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…

DSM 9.0.1 – MySQL Database deployments through VCF Automation

In Data Services Manager 9.0.1, we decided to remove the ability to create MySQL Data Service Policies (DSP) from VCF Automation (VCFA) UI until we can also provision MySQL databases end-to-end. Even though you could create a Data Service Policy via the UI in VCFA 9.0/DSM 9.0, you still had to use the API to create the database. We decided this might be a little confusing, so we disabled the MySQL DSP step in the UI for now and will re-enable it when we can provide the ability to create both MySQL DSP and MySQL database. However, for those of…

DSM 9.0.1 – VCF Operations 9.0.1 Integration Improvements

We have made significant improvements to the integration between Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0.1 and VCF Operations 9.0.1. In version 9.0, the setup to send metrics from DSM to VCF Ops was a little complex, as per this earlier blog post on the subject. In DSM v9.0.1, we’ve added the majority of the steps into the DSM UI to make it much easier and much more straight to configure. Let’s see how in this post. First, login to the DSM UI as a DSM Administrator. Navigate to the Settings menu on the left hand side. Here you will find the…