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Open-source databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL are in high demand, but provisioning them often creates bottlenecks for vSphere admins and DBA teams. Ticket queues grow, governance slips, and “shadow IT” introduces risk. In this video, we show how VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) enables on-demand Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) on VMware Cloud Foundation. Learn how infrastructure policies and RBAC deliver secure, self-service database deployment while maintaining visibility and control. We also highlight how DSM automates HA deployments, read replicas, backups, and point-in-time recovery, eliminating database sprawl and simplifying Day 2 operations. This addresses the common challenges organizations face with database sprawl, lack of governance, configuration drift, and ticketing bottlenecks when developers arbitrarily spin up VMs with databases without proper oversight.
VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) integrates as an appliance and vCenter plugin within an existing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment, leveraging management and workload domains. As a vSphere administrator, you retain control over the infrastructure, defining compute resources (clusters, resource pools, supervisor namespaces), storage policies (vSAN, NFS), and networking (VLANs, VPC subnets). DSM handles IP address assignment and allows administrators to define VM classes (e.g., small, medium, large) to provide granular control over resource allocation. Supported databases currently include PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server in tech preview, with the system designed using cloud-native Kubernetes technologies.
The administrative setup involves configuring S3-compatible backup targets (on-prem or cloud), enabling specific database versions, creating DSM namespaces to group resources, and linking directory groups (such as “developers”) to these namespaces with appropriate DSM user roles. Data service policies tie together specific database engines, namespaces, allowed versions, infrastructure policies, and backup locations, providing robust guardrails for self-service. For developers, this translates to a streamlined experience where they can easily provision single or clustered database instances, perform version upgrades, enable read replicas for scaling, and manage backups, all through a simplified UI or API, receiving a ready-to-use connection string for their applications. DSM also offers basic monitoring and integrates with VCF operations or Prometheus for more comprehensive metric collection, ensuring health and resource management while providing flexible point-in-time recovery options.
Personnel: Eric Gray
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