Learn about on-premises Data Services at VMware Explore 2024, Barcelona

Autumn has arrived in Europe. That can only mean one thing – VMware Explore is almost here. This year, it is once again back in the beautiful city of Barcelona, and I am delighted to be presenting again. This year I only have one two speaking slots. The first is VCFB1809BCN – Accelerate App Innovation with VMware Cloud Foundation Data Services. I’ll be delivering this session with the Data Services Manager (DSM) Product Manager, Junchi Zhang. So if you are looking at a way to provision, manage and monitor open source, modern databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL running on…

Data Services Manager 2.1.x integration with VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions

In my previous blog posts on Data Services Manager, I showed how to integrate DSM with both Aria Automation and the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI). However, another DSM integration available to our customers is through VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions. Customers, especially Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), can now leverage this integration to allow their tenants to provision both Postgres and MySQL databases through DSM, whilst all the same time getting all of the day 2 features of DSM managed databases. This includes lifecycle-management, automatic backup and restore, LDAPS integrated access control to the database and so on. Now,…

Data Services Manager 2.1.1 – Initial Configuration (Video)

Today sees the release of VMware Data Services Manager  (DSM) v2.1.1. To coincide with his release, I decided to create a few short videos to highlight some of the updates we have made to the product. This video demonstrates how to get started with DSM v2.1.1. It shows the how to download the product from the support portal and talks about the use of vSphere client plugins to deploy DSM to your on-premises vSphere infrastructure. It goes on to show how to create your first infrastructure policy to guard-rail your vSphere resources when provisioning databases and data services. The video…

New Webinar: VCF Data Services Manager for Practitioners

Hey all! Quick note to let you know that we are running another 1 hour Data Services Manager webinar. This one is part of the VCF webinar series and will take place on August 14th, 2024 at 11am PST. This is 7pm for those of us in Ireland and the UK, and 8pm for most of western Europe. This webinar will be technical and is focused at practitioners – essentially VI Admins and anyone responsible for managing data and data services on vSphere infrastructure. For those of you who are not aware, Data Services Manager is a way to deploy,…

Encrypting Data Service Manager databases with vSphere Native Key Provider

Following on from last weeks post on encrypting Kubernetes Persistent Volumes, I now wanted to see if I could use the vSphere Native Key Provider to encrypt databases provisioned by Data Services Manager version 2.1. The good news is that this is indeed possible, but we need to make some changes to the DSM Administrator Role’s privileges to enable it to perform encryption operations. Of course, the infrastructure policy used to provision the databases must also have a storage policy that has encryption. And, as stated in the previous article, this functionality is dependent on vSphere 8.0U3. This applies to…

Configuring LDAPS for database access in DSM v2.1

Data Services Manager version 2.1 introduces a much anticipated feature. This is the ability to use LDAPS to give users access to databases. Version 2.0.x already had LDAPS support for user access to the DSM Provider Appliance Portal/UI. Version 2.1 extends that support to the databases which DSM provisions. In this post, we will see how to configure secure LDAPS to connect to Active Directory, and then the steps which are used to grant users access to the databases. We will see how this can be done at database creation time, but also how it can be done after the…

Provisioning databases with Aria Automation, Cloud Consumption Interface and Data Services Manager – Part 4: DSM

Welcome to the 4th and final part of configuring the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) in Aria Automation to enable a user to provision databases using one or more Supervisor Cluster Namespaces. In the previous 3 parts to this setup, we saw how to install Aria Automation v8.17 for CCI support, and how to install the CCI Service onto the Supervisor.  In the most recent post, we went through the steps to configure the CCI to allow an Aria Automation user create Namespaces on a Supervisor and subsequently provision Kubernetes clusters using the TKG Service and VMs via the VM Service.…