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,…

Why choose Data Services Manager as your on-premises DBaaS?

Now that Data Services Manager 9.0 has been officially announced, more and more customers are beginning to realise what this add-on to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can do for their respective organizations who are looking for an on-premises database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution. Simultaneously, I’ve received a number of queries asking me to articulate the benefits of DSM. Although DSM has been around for a number of years now, it would appear that the VCF 9.0 launch has brought it to the attention of more of our customers. In this post, I will attempt to highlight the overall benefits of DSM. I…