DSM + MinIO: Certificate chain obtained from endpoint is incomplete or empty

I recently worked with one of our customers to configure MinIO object storage on-premises.  The plan was to create a number of S3 compatible buckets to provide image, backup and log repositories for VMware Data Services Manager v2.0.x. For security reasons, the customer wanted to create an intermediate certificate of authority (CA), and use that to sign the leaf certificates rather than sign them with a root CA. This is common practice. However, the customer hit the above issue when trying to use the MinIO object store buckets with the leaf certs created from the intermediate cert. I decided to…

Creating a “least privileged” service account for Data Services Manager 2.0.x

Earlier this week, a customer reached out about the installation requirements for Data Services Manager 2.0.x. One of the steps in the installation documentation states the requirement for a vCenter SSO Username. The doc added that this has to be the vCenter server administrator’s SSO username. And even though these SSO admin credentials are not stored, and are in fact discarded after creating a dedicated vCenter service account for VMware Data Services Manager, the customer asked if there was a way to create a “least privileged” user for creating a DSM service account. The answer is yes. This post will…

Getting started with VCF Data Services Manager 2.x – Part 12: Aria Operations for Logs

In this post we are going to look at the log forwarding mechanism in VCF Data Services Manager (DSM). Logs come from two places in DSM. The first is from the DSM Provider Appliance itself, and the second is from the databases and data services which are provisioned by DSM. Two techniques are used to forward the logs to Aria Operations for Logs, formerly known as Log Insight. For the DSM Provider Appliance, we use the Operations for Logs / Log Insight agent. For the databases and data services we use FluentBit. FluentBit can be considered a lightweight version of…

VCF Data Services Manager 2.0.2 – Aria Automation Integration (Video)

Possibly the most eagerly anticipated feature associated with VCF Data Services Manager v2.0.2 is a new set of DSM capabilities for Aria Automation. A new Custom Resource allows DSM PostgreSQL and MySQL databases to be provisioned from Data Services Manager via Aria Automation. If your organisation already uses Aria Automation and you are looking for a DBaaS (Database as a Service) solution, then you should definitely take a closer look at this integration. Read more about the integration here.

Data Services Manager v2.0.2 available with new Aria Automation Integration

Data Services Manager (DSM) version 2.0.2 is now available. Possibly the most eagerly anticipated feature associated with this release is a new set of DSM capabilities for Aria Automation. A new Custom Resource allows DSM PostgreSQL and MySQL databases to be provisioned from Data Services Manager via Aria Automation. If your organisation already uses Aria Automation and you are looking for a DBaaS (Database as a Service) solution, then you should definitely take a closer look. The engineering team has done a great job in making the deployment process of the Custom Resource as seamless as possible, and the README.md…

Data Services Manager 2.0 – Part 11: Simple troubleshooting guidance

As with any product that requires some configuration steps, it is possible to input some incorrect information, and not notice that an issue has occurred until you try some deployments. In this post, I want to share some of the troubleshooting steps that I have used to figure out some misconfigurations I made with Data Services Manager 2.0. Note that this process relies on the admin having some Kubernetes skills. If this is an area you wish to develop, head on over https://kube.academy where there are a number of free lessons to get you started. You may also like to…

Data Services Manager 2.0 – Consumption Operator (Video)

This video highlights another interesting feature of Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0, namely the Consumption Operator. This allows customers with existing Kubernetes deployments to request DSM to provision databases from these K8s clusters, without switching context to either the DSM Gateway API or DSM UI. The videos shows how to install the operator and enable bindings for both infrastructure policies and backup locations. These bindings mean that only those resources can be used by end-users or developers who wish to create databases using this method.