This is a short video which highlights the various aspects of lifecycle management in VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). The demo shows the steps involved in upgrading DSM from v1.3.2 to v1.4. It looks at the steps to upgrade the Provider, the Agents and the version of existing databases which are already deployed. It also highlights points where these updates can be automated from within DSM itself, along with maintenance windows and policies. A more detailed description of the steps are highlighted in this accompanying lifecycle management blog post which covers the same upgrade scenario.
In this post, three aspects of lifecycle management of VMware Data Services Manager are reviewed. An upgrade from DSM v1.3.2 to v1.4 will be used to demonstrate the various aspects of lifecycle management. First, the provider administrator will upgrade the DSM provider. This will be followed by an upgrade of the DSM agents, before finally upgrading the databases. Upgrading from DSM v1.3.2 to v1.4 introduces a new minor version of the supported versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL. If the Allow Minor Version Upgrade option is enabled, then the databases are updated during the next maintenance slot automatically. However, the provider…
I created a short video on how to cluster a standalone PostgreSQL database in VMware Data Services Manager. PostgreSQL is a very popular virtualized workload to run on vSphere infrastructure. In this video, you will see how easy it is to create a clustered PostgreSQL database through VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) in just a few clicks. You will see how when a Read Replica is created, a PG_Monitor VM is also created. The PC_Monitor acts as a quorum or witness, and handles promotion of Read Replicas to primary role in the event of a failover. We will see how…
I continue my journey to learn more about VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). Today, I turn my attention to clustering MySQL to make it highly available on vSphere infrastructure. This is subtlety different to the previous exercise of enabling HA on PostgreSQL. With the MySQL HA implementation, there is no requirement to deploy an additional VM to behave as the witness/quorum such as the PG_Monitor in the case of PostgreSQL. To make MySQL highly available, MySQL InnoDB Cluster is used. This utilizes a feature called group replication to synchronize the different read replicas. It also supports the concept of a…
One the features of Data Services Manager (DSM) that stood out for me was how it could very easily make a standalone database highly available. With just a single click, users can deploy the necessary monitoring VMs (in the case of PostgreSQL, a PG_Monitor) and additional Read Only Replicas. In this post, I will show how to create a highly available database using DSM. I will highlight some of the requirements, and also some of what is taking place under the covers while the HA operation is in progress. Requirements Let’s begin by outline some of the requirements. The main…
In this short video, I provide an overview of the configuration tasks involved in setting up VMware Data Services Manager, a VMware product that allows for the ticket-less, self-service deployment of databases whilst keeping the security, compliance and life-cycle management in the hands of IT (or the vSphere Administrators). If you find the video interesting, please check out some of the more detailed blogs posts around VMware Data Services Manager on this site, such as the architectural overview, the agent deployment steps, and database deployment steps. On a somewhat related note, VMware Data Services Manager version 1.4 is now available.…
In an earlier blog post, the steps to provision a database from a database template using VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) were described. We also previously observed that once the DSM provider configuration is complete, some predefined database templates for both MySQL and PostgreSQL become available for publishing. However, there is also an early access model to allow for the deployment of SQL Server databases using DSM. This does require some additional setup steps to manually create the SQL Server database template. This is the purpose of this post. Once again, we are using the latest version of VMware DSM…