Today we’re announcing a new feature of VMware Tanzu SQL called data management for VMware Tanzu. It offers a convenient user interface that simplifies the operation, automation, and scalability of Tanzu SQL databases (Postgres and MySQL); this same convenience is also available from a comprehensive set of APIs. But whichever way you choose to access it, data management for Tanzu enables organizations to provide developers and end users with a database-as-a-service experience in vSphere data centers.
Why are we introducing this? At VMware, we spend a lot of time helping our customers achieve digital transformation. Indeed, we’ve created a portfolio of software solutions to bring Dev and Ops together so as to enable our customers to continuously build, run, and manage their most critical applications on their cloud of choice.
So what about the data layer of the application stack? Legacy databases running in the data center have archaic methods of service creation and management—the exact opposite of the agility and speed that developers want. Meanwhile, data teams and platform operators are forced to perform the manual drudge work involved in standing up databases and managing their entire lifecycles. Some of our customers spend the better part of a year planning upgrades, time they’d rather spend supporting the business. But while a managed database service in the cloud provides all the flexibility, speed, and elasticity that comes with self-service deployment, running in the public cloud often means giving up some control over the data. The ability to recover from outages depends in large part on the priorities of the cloud provider.
Data management for Tanzu bridges these worlds to enable cloud native ease of use for databases running on premises. Let’s take a closer look at how it works.
The simplicity of database as a service for vSphere data centers
Data management for Tanzu is both a graphical control plane and a collection of APIs for managing the lifecycle of Postgres and MySQL databases in vSphere-powered data centers. Now, both enterprises and cloud service providers can run managed database services for their own users or for other organizations. Data management for Tanzu’s self-service provisioning and automated database lifecycle management enables developers and other end users to easily self-provision their choice of MySQL or Postgres database clusters. Organizations can restrict users to standardized configurations or allow them to create their own configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and management parameters. The result is that end users gain self-service convenience while enterprises can ensure conformance to all policies and standards.
For a quick overview of data management for Tanzu in action, check out this 3-minute introduction video:
Point-and-click database lifecycle management
Here are some of the key capabilities that organizations get with data management for Tanzu.
Fast provisioning options – Open source database templates (Postgres and MySQL), pre-packaged and certified by VMware, enable organizations to quickly spin up database instances. You can offer users pre-set configurations of CPU, memory, and storage, or allow them to customize resources according to the needs of the application. It's also easy to configure backups, replication, and maintenance windows, and many other configuration settings with a few clicks.
Simply point and click to create and manage fleets of Postgres and MySQL databases
Automated operations – common rote tasks like security patches, version upgrades, and certificate management can all be automated. For IT operators responsible for managing underlying infrastructure, data management for Tanzu also offers OS and infrastructure monitoring capabilities. For data teams, it takes care of patching, updates, read replicas, template management, and failover.
Extensive monitoring – Gain visibility into both database and underlying local and cloud resources, including metrics such as the utilization of CPU, memory, network, local, and cloud storage, as well as curated alarms and notifications for improved visibility into the health of both the database and the underlying infrastructure. The dashboard can be used to view system health, the health of ESXi hosts, and capacity metrics such as local and cloud storage availability. Each database is also given its own enhanced monitoring dashboard that displays usage and performance insights.
Easily deploy a database or a fleet of databases
When a user requests a database, an agent downloads a template from a VMware-managed repository for provisioning (the control plane and resource manager files are also downloaded from a trusted repository). Users can create a single instance, a cluster, or multiple clusters as their needs demand. They can even run different versions of the same database, or run multiple database engines at the same time (currently MySQL and Postgres are supported). And they can target a database to a particular vSphere cluster or to different clusters with differing scale and capabilities.
The architecture of data management for VMware Tanzu
There are also options for automated updates and OS and database security patches for every template. Users can choose from among these options when the database is created or select them after the fact. Automatic upgrades for minor versions are also an option; unlike manual or script-driven upgrades, with automatic upgrades there’s no chance of leaving a database unpatched. In the meantime, activating the point-and-click data protection setting ensures that cloud or local backups happen automatically. Highly available cluster configurations are similarly easy.
Best of all, this power is available via an easy-to-use graphical user interface, or programmatically through OpenAPI-compliant APIs! Data management for Tanzu supports vSphere 6.7 and vSphere 7.0 infrastructure; Postgres v10.X, v11.X, and v12.X; and MySQL v8.X databases.
Data management for Tanzu automates the lower-level details of the database lifecycle
Get started with the convenience of DBaaS on vSphere!
Data management for Tanzu is available as a download from VMware Tanzu Network as well as via VMware Customer Connect. For more information on the VMware Tanzu Data portfolio, please visit VMware Tanzu Data Services or contact your VMware representative. We're also offering two webinars to introduce the capabilities of data management for Tanzu—take your choice of our August 19 or August 23 sessions!
VMware Tanzu data and infrastructure experts are available to support you at every step of your application and data transformation journey. Let us help you exploit modern development practices and technologies to achieve your digital transformation objectives.
