DSM 9.0.2 – Aria Automation plugin changes to support new RBAC features

VMware Data Service Manager 9.0.2.0 has achieved General Availability (GA) status, and is now readily accessible from the Broadcom Download Portal. You can see the full DSM 9.0.2 release notes here. In this post, I want to revisit our efforts to integrate DSM with Aria Automation. It is true to say that most of our efforts are going into integrating VMware Data Services Manager 9.x with VMware Cloud Foundation Automation 9.x. However, many customer are still on their journey to VCF 9.x, and continue to use earlier versions of our products.  One such product that our customers are still using…

DSM 9.0.2 – New Microsoft SQL Server Enhancements – SQL Server Agent Support

VMware Data Service Manager 9.0.2.0 has achieved General Availability (GA) status, and is now readily accessible from the Broadcom Download Portal. You can see the full DSM 9.0.2 release notes here. In this post, I want to revisit our efforts to deliver a Microsoft SQL Server data service. As mentioned in a number of previous posts, we continue to work towards a fully supported Microsoft SQL Server data service in DSM. And whilst we do not have a generally available, supported release of this service in DSM version 9.0.2, we have made some significant enhancements once again in this release.…

Velero Revisited – Manually backing up VKS clusters using Velero

It’s been some time since I looked at how to use the Velero CLI to backup and restore some modern applications running in a Kubernetes cluster. However, after publishing how to use the new VKS Manager (VKSM) Data Protection (DP) earlier this week, it was mentioned that many customers who are on their VCF 9.x journey and who are using the Supervisor and vSphere Kubernetes Service to deploy VKS clusters, have not yet deployed VCF Automation into their VCF stack. This means that they do not have VKSM DP available to them just yet. So the question was whether or…

A first look at VKSM Data Protection (VKSM DP)

One of the new features in VCF Automation version 9.0.1 is a feature called vSphere Kubernetes Service Management, or VKSM for short. This gives users access to many additional capabilities, such as Data Protection, Policy Management and Add-on Management to improve the resiliency, security, and functionality of your VKS clusters. In this post, I wanted to take a look at the Data Protection capability (VKSM DP for short), as this is something I looked at quite closely in the past. To demonstrate, we will first configure a backup location, then enable Data Protection, then test a backup and restore of…

Using the VCF 9.x CLI to troubleshoot a DSM database running on VKS

As many readers are now aware, databases provisioned from DSM via VCF Automation have the option to create a vSphere Kubernetes Service cluster to host the database. The decision to use a VKS cluster or whether to use DSM’s own Kubernetes cluster is based on the Infrastructure Policy. If the Infrastructure Policy is built on traditional vSphere resources, then DSM’s own K8s is used. If the Infrastructure Policy points to a Supervisor Namespace, then VKS is used. In this post, I wanted to provide some tips and tricks on accessing and troubleshooting the DSM database and VKS cluster backing the…

DSM 9.0.1 – Using IaaS Resource Policies to fine-tune database deployments in VCF Automation

In this post, we will take a look at another new feature of VCF Automation, IaaS Resource Policies. I will demonstrate how these IaaS policies can be used with Data Service Policies and DSM provisioned databases to fine-tune certain parameters related to the database. You may have already seen the concept of Data Service Policies in previous posts. These are policies set at the Provider level which can dictate which database engines, which database versions and which backup locations a tenant of an organization can consume. However additional validations or constraints in an IaaS policy can be applied at an…

DSM 9.0.1 – Using VCFA Blueprints to provision databases

In my previous post, I showed how the VCF Consumption CLI could be used to provision a MySQL database when Data Services Manager is integrated with VCF Automation. We could use the same VCF Consumption CLI to provision Postgres databases also. However, I wanted to show you another way that databases could be provisioned using blueprints in VCF Automation (VCFA). Readers may find this useful as it will allow you to track MySQL database instances provisioned via VCF Automation, even though the MySQL Data Service Policy and MySQL databases are not currently plumbed up into the VCFA UI (his will…