A common question I get asked when giving talks on Data Service Manager (DSM) version 2.0 is “what happens to the databases and data services when the DSM appliance / provider has an outage?” The simple answer is that nothing happens to your data services or databases – they will continue to run as before. Of course, without the DSM appliance, you do not have access to the UI to manage and monitor the databases, nor do you have access to the gateway API. Therefore it won’t be possible to provision new data services. So the next obvious question is…
In this post, I want to demonstrate some of the key “day 2” features of Data Service Manager 2.0. Day 2 operations are typically operation that an administrator might carry out after a data service / database is already deployed and configured. This blog will discuss operations such as the ability for a DSM administrator to assign database ownership to a different DSM User. We will also see how it is possible to both clone an existing database and how to restore a new database from a backup. These operations will be done from the UI but I did want…
In this short video, one of the really nice self-service features of VMware Data Services Manager is demonstrated. In the video, we see how someone with the role of an Org Administrator is able to build databases, and then give ownership to some end-users, possibly a developer. We will then see how this end user can consume the database, whilst also carrying out important tasks such as on-the-fly backups whenever the database has some critical data added. Finally, we will see how this same end-user can initiated a restore of the database from a particular point in time (PIT) if…
I recently published an article around Velero and vSAN File Services, showing how Velero and the restic plugin could be used to backup and restore Kubernetes application that used vSAN File Services. Today, I want to turn my attention to a very cool new plugin that we announced in mid-April, namely the Velero Plugin for vSphere. This open source plugin enables Velero to take a crash-consistent VADP* snapshot backup of a block Persistent Volume on vSphere storage, and store the backup on S3 compatible storage. * VADP is short for VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection. To utilize the…
It has been a while since I looked at Velero, our backup and restore product for Kubernetes cluster resources. This morning I noticed that the Velero team just published version 1.4. This article uses the previous version of Velero, version is v1.3.2. The version should not make a difference to the article. In this post, I want to see Velero backing up and restoring applications that use read-write-many (RWX) volumes that are dynamically provisioned as file shares from vSAN 7.0 File Services. To demonstrate, I’ll create two simple busybox Pods in their own namespace. Using the vSphere CSI driver, Kubernetes…
I have written about Velero a few times on this blog, but I haven’t actually looked at how you would deploy the 1.0.0 version, even though it has been available since May 2019. Someone recently reached out to me for some guidance on how to deploy it, as there are a few subtle differences between previous versions. Therefore I decided to document step-by-step how to do it, but focusing on when your Kubernetes cluster is running on vSphere. I also highlight a gotcha when using Velero to backup applications that are running on Kubernetes deployed via Enterprise PKS, Pivotal Container…
If you’ve been following my posts for the last week or so, you’ll have noticed my write-ups on Velero backups and restores using the new release candidate (RC). I also did a recent write-up on Portworx volumes and snapshots. In this post, I’ll bring them both together, and show you how Velero and Portworx are integrated to allow backups and restores of container applications using Portworx volumes. However, first, let’s take a step back. As was highlighted to me recently, all of this is very new to a lot of people, so let’s spend a little time setting the context.…