Continuing on with my series of blog posts which examine the new features and functionality of VMware Data Services Manager version 2.0, this post will look at some of the vertical scaling (scale up) and horizontal scaling (scale out) in DSM 2.0. We start with a standalone PostgreSQL database deployment, and then focus on the scale out initially by changing the topology from a single node to a three node database cluster. In a standalone Postgres database, the Primary role and the Monitor role exist as separate Pods on the same VM. By changing the topology, the Primary and Monitor…
So far, we have seen how to create an infrastructure policy and how to configure the DSM Provider appliance. In this third post in the series, I will show you how to deploy a Data Service via Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0. The data service in question is PostgreSQL, an open-source database which our telemetry tells us is a very popular database deployed on vSphere infrastructure by our customers. Let’s examine the steps involved in deploying PostgreSQL via the DSM UI, whilst also noting that DSM has a very rich API allowing deployment of these data services via various automation…
In part 1, we saw how to deploy the Data Services Manager (DSM) appliance. We also saw how to create our first infrastructure policy, and also create a permission which will allow a ‘data administrator’ to logon to the DSM appliance. In this second blog in the series, we will use this admin user to complete the DSM appliance setup tasks. Note that the DSM Appliance is often referred to as the Provider, and you will see this term used regularly in the UI and the logs. Once the Provider setup is completed, the ‘data administrator’ will then be able…
This is another short video showing the main steps to configure Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) to monitor databases provisioned via VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). Note that there is a requirement to install True Insight Management Packs for PostgreSQL (and MySQL) with Aria Operations. Thus, there may be a licensing cost associated with this. However, if you are already using Aria Operations as your single pane of glass for monitoring all of your vSphere Infrastructure, then there may be benefits to using the same mechanism to monitor your databases. The purpose here is to demonstrate that provisioning databases via…
VMware Data Services Manager version 1.5 introduces a number of really cool new features. In particular, it includes the ability to deploy a consolidated environment. A consolidated environment is where the functionality of the provider AND the functionality of an agent reside in the same virtual appliance. Previously, customers had to deploy two appliances, even when consuming resources from the vSphere infrastructure where the provider resided. Note that if you wish to consume resources across different vSphere infrastructures which are remote from where the provider is provisioned, then you will still have to deploy an agent VM. However, in this…
A very short video to accompany the blog post I made on the subject of webhooks earlier this week. This video shows how to create a slack app with webhooks enabled. It then shows how to configure VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.5 to send notifications via slack when there is a status change or failure on any of the provisioned databases managed by DSM. This can be an extremely useful mechanism for administrators. Although the video only shows the slack integration steps, it is also possible to use the webhook mechanism to send alerts to ServiceNow, as well as…
In my most recent post, we looked at how to send email alerts via SMTP from VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.5. In this post, we will look at how to send alert notifications using a different method, webhooks. For the purposes of this post, we will examine the steps involved in sending webhook notifications to a slack channel. However, VMware Data Services Manager v1.5 also supports the option to configure webhook notifications to ServiceNow as well as custom webhook configurations for other applications. We will begin this post by first creating a slack application, enabling the web hook features…