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 an earlier post on object storage, we look at the role privieges that VCF Automation users could be assigned within an organization. Since the scope of object storage privileges is at the project level, we also looked at the role of Project Admins and Project Advanced Users. within a project. We saw how a Project Admin could grant access control to different Project Users, creating access control policies to control which s3 actions and which s3 resource that a user was allowed in a given project. In this post, I wanted to take this a little further. As mentioned,…
In a previous post, I highlighted how to get started with Native Object Storage which is in tech preview in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9.1.1. In that post, we saw the role of the Provider Admin and the Organization Admin in VCF Automation (VCFA). We saw that the Provider Admin could create object storage on behalf of the tenant users within an organization, but could not actually create or view the buckets on the object store, nor see the access controls or anything else associated with the object store for that matter. We saw that the Org Admin had…
Many readers may have read this blog article on Native Object Storage from my good pal, Pete Koehler. In that post, which was published back in May of this year and coincided with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9.1 release, Pete talked about a tech preview of Native Object Storage. Well, with the release of VCF 9.1.1, the tech preview has now begun. Although the tech preview of Native Object Storage is not open to everybody, we will be working with a select set of customers and gathering critical feedback. Our objective is to have a robust Native Object…
In my VMware Data Services Manager 9.1 launch post, I mentioned that this release now has the ability to use vSAN ESA snapshots to create a copy of a MySQL database. I also mentioned that this snapshot could then be used to very quickly spin up additional copies of the database using the “clone from snapshot” feature. I also mentioned that this feature is not yet plumbed up into the VCF Automation UI, but that it is available via the API. And since that is the case, it is then possible to go ahead and create VCF Automation blueprint. The…
I am delighted to announce the availability of a new book, VMware vSAN 8.0U1 Express Storage Architecture. Along with my colleagues, Duncan Epping and Pete Koehler, we have updated the vSAN deep dive book to focus on the new vSAN architecture which was announced with the vSphere & vSAN 8.0 releases. We held off publication as we were aware of a number of upcoming enhancements in 8.0U1. Now that this release is generally available, the book includes all of the new features and functionality found in the 8.0U1 release. Please note that we made a decision not to focus on…
One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere clusters placed in separate racks in a single physical datacenter, as per the release notes. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on…