I am delighted to announce the availability of a new book, VMware vSAN 8.0U1 Express Storage Architecture. Along with my colleagues, Duncan Epping and Pete Koehler, we have updated the vSAN deep dive book to focus on the new vSAN architecture which was announced with the vSphere & vSAN 8.0 releases. We held off publication as we were aware of a number of upcoming enhancements in 8.0U1. Now that this release is generally available, the book includes all of the new features and functionality found in the 8.0U1 release. Please note that we made a decision not to focus on…
Its been some time since I wrote an article on VMware Cloud Foundation. However, I recently caught up with my good pal Gary Blake who informed me about a significant new development in the VCF space. This is the release of a new fling called the VMware Cloud Foundation Configuration File Generator. This new fling will enable us to replace the Deployment Parameter Workbook with a containerized web application. This new application has the ability to validate all of the configuration inputs before generating the JSON file. This file is then used by the Cloud Builder appliance to bring up…
I had a recent question about integrating VMware Data Services Manager v1.4 with Microsoft Active Directory for users. This is indeed possible. In this post, I will demonstrate how Organization Admins and Organization Users can be integrated as Active Directory users, and subsequently granted access to Data Services Manager. This is achieved by configuring the LDAP settings in DSM to communicate with Active Directory in this example. The configuration steps include creating two AD Groups in AD, one for Org Admins and one for Org Users. These groups will then be added to one or more organizations in my DSM…
VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.4 has a substantial amount of built-in monitoring, not just for analyzing the health and behaviour of the vSphere environments where the databases are running, but also the databases themselves. In this post, I will highlight what those metrics are, and where to find them in the Provider UI. We will begin by looking at the ‘Environment’ monitoring and metrics, before turning our attention to the ‘Database’. Environment The first interesting view of an environment is the Health. This view shows us the health of the agent, and whether any of the major components that…
In this video, you will see how easy it is to create a clustered MySQL database through VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.4. The video shows how to deploy a clustered MySQL database at deployment time rather than building a standalone MySQL database and then enabling a clustered configuration. You will see how a ‘clustered’ IP address is used to act as a front-end IP address for the cluster, and also how a read-write access port of 6446 is used to connect to the database rather than the default port of 3306. Finally, you will see how to use the…
This short video steps through the cloning of an existing database, highlighting another self-service feature of VMware Data Services Manager. This task can be done directly in the DSM UI by an end user, adding to the self-service capabilities available in the product. The demo will show how to take the clone, and then uses pgAdmin 4 to connect to the databases, validate the results of the cloning operation (by looking at the schema and tables), and then examining the contents of one of the cloned tables. Hope you find it useful. Please reach out with any thoughts, comments or…
In this short video, one of the really nice self-service features of VMware Data Services Manager is demonstrated. In the video, we see how someone with the role of an Org Administrator is able to build databases, and then give ownership to some end-users, possibly a developer. We will then see how this end user can consume the database, whilst also carrying out important tasks such as on-the-fly backups whenever the database has some critical data added. Finally, we will see how this same end-user can initiated a restore of the database from a particular point in time (PIT) if…