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,…

VAAI-NAS, vCloud Director and Cloning Offload Strangeness

I was in a conversation with one of my pals over at Tintri last week (Fintan), and he observed some strange behaviour when provisioning VMs from a catalog in vCloud Director (vCD). When he disabled Fast Provisioning, he expected that provisioning further VMs from the catalog would still be offloaded via the VAAI-NAS plugin. All the ESXi hosts have the VAAI-NAS plugin from Tintri installed. However,  it seems that the provisioning/cloning operation was not being offloaded to the array, and the ESXi hosts resources were being used for the operation instead. Deployments of VMs from the catalogs were taking minutes…

The requested operation will exceed the VDC’s storage quota

vSphere 5.1 introduced a number of vCloud Director (vCD) interoperability features from a storage perspective, namely ability to take VM snapshots from within the vCD UI, interoperability with Storage Profiles and interoperability with Storage DRS. Admittedly, its been a while since I played with vCD and I am a little rusty, but I wanted to see how well these storage features worked with vCD 5.1. I’ll follow-up with some future posts on how this all integrates, but this first post is just to highlight an issue I ran into in my haste to get the environment up and running. The…