In today’s world of modern applications, Database as a Service (DBaaS) has become an essential service offering, providing tenant organizations with scalable, efficient, and cost-effective database management solutions without the need to handle complex infrastructure. As more businesses – across industry verticals, from e-commerce to Finance and Healthcare – adopt DBaaS for mission-critical applications, the importance of strong database recovery & management strategy becomes increasingly significant. And the cost of downtime – be it from a database failure due to high traffic surge or an accidental deletion of a database – will have detrimental effects on business operations and the reputation.
We have focused on aiding our service providers to build a robust data recovery strategy with the new version of VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions.
We are happy to announce the general availability of VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions version 1.6. In this blog, let us try to explore the latest upgrades and enhancements that is packed in this release.
Our main focus for this version was on three aspects:
- Introducing the latest Data Services Manager (2.2) features
- Enhancing the Data Services Manager integration
- Empowering database (DB) admin users with greater flexibility and control
Introduction of new VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.2 features to VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions
Last year we began integration of DSM with VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions. We have now made the latest features of DSM 2.2 available.
Enhanced Lifecycle Management
We now support major version upgrades for VMware Data Services Manager PostgreSQL instances (versions supported 13, 14, 15 & 16). So, users can directly upgrade their VMware Data Services Manager PostgreSQL instance to any of the major versions through the VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions dashboard.
Enhanced Availability & Disaster Recovery
With Multi-Site Multi Zone Deployment/ Back up capabilities – Users now can choose from three different deployment options:
1. Standalone deployment on a single node on a single VM.
2. Clustered deployment on a clustered 3 node vSphere across hypervisors.
3. Cross Cluster deployment across different vSphere clusters.
This is highly useful for database maintenance and provides high availability. Read it in detail here.
Note that, Provider Admin should first define Infrastructure policies in vSphere to offer cross cluster HA options.
It is a very similar operation for remote replications for backups, where users can toggle the ‘Enable Backup’ button to provide replication settings to create a secondary DB instance.
The above figure shows how to create a secondary instance for replication.
Availability of Secondary instance shown above.
Backup Improvements & Delete Protection
Users can now restore and recover deleted database instances (VMware Data Services Manager Postgres and VMware Data Services Manager MySQL instances.) within a 30 day retention period. Please note, that users have flexibility to modify this retention period based on requirement. Users can also set a recovery point objective (RPO) based on the DB needs. These operations can be done through the ‘Archive’ tab as shown below
Enhanced Integration with Data Services Manager
Firstly, users will see the new UI flow with simplified and categorised tabs for specific operations and management of VMware Data Services Manager solutions. Along with reports and alerts tabs that have been introduced for quicker and simpler operations and management.
The other major improvement that we have is the ability to deploy provider-managed Data Solutions Operator (DSO) on to either VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension (CSE) clusters or vSphere Kubernetes Cluster (VKS). This greatly simplifies and eases multiple operations across different UIs for DB Admins to work on VMware Data Services Manager Postgres and VMware Data Services Manager MySQL databases.
We have announced the deprecation of Tanzu MySQL and Tanzu Postgres starting this version and users will be able to see the ‘deprecated’ label on the Tanzu MySQL & Tanzu Postgres DBs that are already running. Please note that, users can still continue using their existing Tanzu DBs as usual. However, there would be no version upgrades supported going forward.
Other Enhancements
We have introduced upgrades to help DB Admin users get greater control and visibility for better management and resource optimisation. Admin users can now see the resource consumption and usage for each tenant organisation as shown below:
Next, starting from this release, Admin users can revert or roll back conditions in case of update failure / issues of the DB instances. This operation can be done as shown below through the ‘Resource Condition’ tab where the Admin can see the issue along with a description message.
Along with these, Admin users can now change/delegate ownership of DB instances helping them offload DB management to specific user organisations. This helps Admin personas to manage fewer instances and at the user end increases developer velocity by depending less on Admin for each change request. However, there are ‘Access Control’ measures for Admins to provide partial/ full ownership to the users.
Next steps:
Upgrade your current VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions instance to the new 1.6. You can directly up-grade to version 1.6 from version 1. 5 and 1.4.
Check out our upgrade guide for a step-by-step guide.
To know more details about the release, please visit our documentation page.
We hope that this new release provides our VCSPs a great platform to deliver robust database management that ensures resilient and secure services to business-critical applications and business continuity.
