On a recent customer call regarding Postgres instances and databases provisioned by Data Services Manager (DSM), there was a question regarding Active Directory / LDAP integration. Specifically, there was a question on how to automatically provide an Active Directory / LDAP group access to a Postgres database. Now, as many readers are aware, DSM already supports Directory Services such as Active Directory and LDAPS for Postgres databases. See this earlier blog post on how to do that. But once Directory Services is configured in DSM, and selected during Postgres database provisioning, the DBA needs to create logins and grant access…
I recently received a query regarding support for iSCSI in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. To be exact, the query was related to iSCSI-backed VMFS volumes, and if VCF 9.0 could be built using these volume types. It took a little bit of digging, and a few questions to our product management team, but I finally got an answer to the question. It is multi-faceted, as there is of course the VCF Management Domain and the VCF Workload Domains. There is also the concept of Principal and Supplemental storage to consider. Finally, there is the concept of “greenfield”, new deployments of…
Following on from my previous post on this topic, a number of people reached out to ask about how to add read-write-many (RWX) volumes to a Pod in VKS. Again, for dynamic volumes, this is quite simple to do. But what about some static volumes which were initially created by the Volume Service. This is a summary of what I posted in my previous blog in relation to RWX volumes. “Since RWX volumes are back by vSAN File Shares in VCF 9.0, you will need to have vSAN File Service enabled and configured. You will also have to tell the…
I have been spending some time looking at the new Volume Service in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0. Through VCF Automation, is is possible for tenants of VCF to provision their own volumes. These volumes can be consumed by the VM Service, something that has been a part of the Supervisor Services for many years. However, it is also possible for workloads running in VKS, the vSphere Kubernetes Service, to consume the static volumes provisioned via the Volume Service. In this post, I will show you the steps to create a static volume via the Volume Service, and then create…
Continuing on from the VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 introductory videos from my most recent post, these next two videos look at how to configure VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation in VCF 9.0 with DSM to provide a true DBaaS (Database as a Service) experience to your VCF tenants and end users. The first video looks at the setup steps and goes on to provision a Postgres database using a traditional, DSM-Manager infrastructure policy through VCF Automation. The second video uses a new feature of DSM 9.0 and VCF Automation. It demonstrates how one can build an Infrastructure Policy…
In the following videos, I demonstrate how to install the VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 appliance via the vSphere Client Plugin mechanism. I then take a look at how to to build out first infrastructure policy, which allows a VI Admins to put guard rails around which resource are being consumed by the DSM data services. This prevents data sprawl on your on-premises VCF infrastructure. Lastly, we see how to deploy a new Microsoft SQL Server instance along with a few user databases to demonstrate the new MS SQL Server data service. This is currently in tech preview in…
A few weeks back, I was invited by Pete and John to join them on their Virtually Speaking Podcast. As the guys said, ‘If you’re curious about what “Database-as-a-Service” really looks like in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment, this episode is for you’. Enjoy!