While there are many use-cases for object storage, I wanted to create a short post to highlight some of the use-cases that I have been trying out in my own lab. Two of the use cases are for backup and logs, and another is as an S3 Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) for Greenplum databases. In the first use-case, I will show you how to configure an S3 bucket for both VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) backups and logs, both for the databases and the provider appliance itself. In a second backup use-case, I will show how you can configure a…
In a post from last year, I demonstrated how one could use the VCF CLI to troubleshoot the underlying vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) on which a VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) database is provisioned. In this follow up post, we will look at how we can use the VCF CLI to fine tune the database itself. This blog post stemmed from a request by one of our customers who wished to modify the backup retention policy and reduce the number of days that a backup is retained. Now you might be wondering why using the VCF CLI is necessary to…
I was recently asked to assist with some troubleshooting of the Email Alerting mechanism in Data Services Manager (DSM). The first thing to note is that there are different types of alerts that can be raised and emailed in DSM. The first type are Global Alerts, and these are emailed to the DSM Admin. The second type are Database Alerts, and these are emailed to all of the DSM Users (permissions) who are part of the DSM Namespace where the database is provisioned. Those of you familiar with Data Services Manager will know DSM Users are granted permission to provision…
Many of my recent posts have focused on the new Microsoft SQL Server data service in the 9.1 version of VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). On the back of those posts, I had a query about whether it was possible to use the Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack for VCF Operations that is available on the VCF Solutions Catalog with DSM provisioned SQL Servers. The short answer is yes, you can install this management pack in your VCF Operations and create a SQL Server account for it. The Management Pack for Microsoft SQL Server now connects to your Microsoft SQL…
A very quick message to let you know that I was recently invited to present on VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) by our VMware TAM (Technical Account Manager) Services team. In the video, I provide an update to our TAM customers on our current DSM version 9.0.2, and give some insight into our latest tech preview of the Microsoft SQL Server DBaaS service as well as a demonstration on how our full integration of DSM into VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x and VCF Automation is progressing. Hope you find it useful and informative. Feel free to reach out to me via…
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…
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…