Using ldap2pg to integrate between AD Groups and Postgres Roles

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…

Getting started with DSM 9.0 and VCF Automation (Videos)

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…

Getting started with DSM 9.0 – Short Video Series

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…

Sending DSM 9.0 metrics to Prometheus & Grafana

Following on from my previous post on how to send VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 metrics to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations, I now want to show how it is also possible to send the DSM database metrics to Prometheus. In this post, I will demonstrate how to ship metrics to Prometheus, and of course, use Prometheus as a data source for Grafana to build a sample dashboard. To make things a bit simpler for myself, I am going to use Helm to deploy both Prometheus and Grafana on my vanilla Kubernetes (K8s) cluster. The Prometheus and Grafana deployments…

Sending DSM 9.0 metrics to VCF Operations

In the DSM 9.0 Release Notes, the following item about metrics is listed in the What’s New section: You can use the VMware Data Services Manager API to publish PostgreSQL and MySQL metrics to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 (VCF) Operations and Prometheus [..] enabling better visibility, alerting, and performance management for all databases that VMware Data Services manages. In this post, I will show how to configure DSM 9.0 to send Postgres and MySQL database metrics to VCF 9.0 Operations. While this process is rather manual in VCF 9.0, we plan to significantly improve this overall experience for users going forward.…

Creating firewall rules in NSX to control client access to DSM provisioned databases

This post began as a request from one of our customers. They wanted to know how one would go about allowing a select set of clients access a select set of databases provisioned by Data Services Manager, whilst simultaneously preventing access to other databases. I put my head together with my DSM buddy Thomas and came up with the following solution. We thought it interesting enough to share in a blog post, but we may also put this into the official DSM docs as well. Whilst this is using VCF 9.0 and new constructs such as VPCs and VPC subnets,…