VMware vFabric Data Director
Powering Database-as-a-Service for Your Cloud
Overview:
VMware® vFabric™ Data Director is a database- virtualization and lifecycle– management platform that powers database as a service in your cloud, increasing agility and reducing database TCO. vFabric Data Director reduces capex through database-aware virtualization on VMware vSphere, increases agility through automated lifecycle management, and accelerates analytics and application development through policy-based self-service. Designed for both enterprises and service providers, vFabric Data Director empowers administrators to securely automate and delegate routine tasks, including heterogeneous data engine provisioning, backup and cloning.
Improve agility and drastically reduce database TCO through database-aware virtualization and self-service lifecycle management with vFabric Data Director. Securely automate routine tasks, including database provisioning, high availability, backup, and cloning. Data Director is a unified platform for heterogeneous databases and Hadoop, currently supporting Oracle, SQL Server, VMware vFabric Postgres, and multiple Hadoop distributions. Hadoop support is powered using Serengeti, an open source project initiated by VMware for deployment and management of Hadoop clusters in virtual environments. Enjoy the agility of public cloud database and Hadoop services with enterprise-grade security, flexibility, control and compliance.
vFabric Data Director currently supports Oracle 10gR2, 11gR2, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, VMware vFabric Postgres 9.1.6, and Hadoop 1.0 distributions, with more data engines to be supported in the future. Hadoop support is powered using Serengeti, an open source project initiated by VMware for deployment and management of Hadoop clusters in virtual environments.
Key Benefits:
- Reduce database hardware and license costs through database-aware virtualization on vSphere.
- Increase agility through automated database lifecycle management.
- Accelerate analytics and application development through policy-based self-service.
What is VMware vFabric Data Director?
Enterprises and service providers are rapidly implementing next- generation, self-service cloud platforms that enable IT to quickly provision virtual machines and other core infrastructure components, proving the benefits of cloud computing. Now users want similar benefits from the more-complex software solutions that are powered by the core infrastructure. Data engines are the next frontier of virtualization, including databases and Hadoop clusters. Databases are being virtualized to address issues of growing database infrastructure, long lead times for developers, overworked DBAs, and excessive operational cost of databases. Hadoop is the upcoming technology for analyzing petabytes of data, i.e., big data analytics. Current implementations on physical hardware are extremely costly due to low utilization, excessively time consuming, and inherently unreliable due to many single points of failure in Hadoop.
VMware vFabric Data Director is a software solution that enables you to implement database-aware virtualization on vSphere, and provide database as a service in your cloud. It automates deployment, management and governance of heterogeneous data engines, and enables policy- based self-service database management for application developers. vFabric Data Director combines the convenience and ease of use of public cloud services with the enterprise- grade security, flexibility, control and compliance required to build your own private and hybrid clouds.
At A Glance
VMware vFabric Data Director powers Databaseas- a-Service for your cloud and drastically accelerates application development cycles. Built for private and hybrid clouds, vFabric Data Director empowers administrators to securely automate and delegate routine tasks, including database provisioning, backup, cloning, and more. vFabric Postgres 9.0, the vSphere-optimized ACID and ANSI-SQL relational database, delivers the elasticity and performance required for the cloud. vFabric Data Director offers the agility of public cloud database services with enterprise-grade security, flexibility, control and compliance.
Provision and Manage Highly Available, Elastic, Multi-tenant Hadoop in Minutes
Provisioning a Hadoop cluster typically require large amount of hardware, complex setup and can take days to weeks to provision. vFabric Data Director leverages Serengeti, an open source project initiated by VMware, to provision, configure, and scale a Hadoop cluster on vSphere with a simple command or a few clicks. Data Director supports major distributions of Hadoop including Apache Hadoop 1.0.x, Cloudera CDH3, Greenplum HD 1.1 and 1.2, and Hortonworks HDP-1.
With Data Director, customers can run Hadoop with other workloads on existing vSphere clusters, and scale Hadoop on demand.
Increase Availability of Hadoop Clusters
Although Hadoop is known to provide reliability via data replication, there are certain major components that are single points of failure in the system. Examples include the 'namenode', the 'jobtracker' and other supporting components. Data Director can address the high availability needs of all these components in a generic way with vSphere vMotion™, High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) features, keeping your Hadoop system running efficiently on your virtual infrastructure, with minimal or no downtime.
Key Features:
Database-aware Virtualization
By using database virtualization, businesses are achieving cost savings and operational benefits through consolidation. Virtualizing databases requires a series of steps, and DBAs need to be familiar with the virtual infrastructure and operations. vFabric Data Director simplifies this process by providing a unified platform with integrated capabilities. It enables DBAs to easily virtualize databases on the proven vSphere infrastructure:
- Resource management and isolation – vFabric Data Director offers flexible resource management and isolation at the tenant and database level, thereby eliminating the "noisy neighbor" problem—interference caused by multiple databases sharing the same pool of resources.
- Integrated template management – Administrator-controlled database templates help to guarantee corporate compliance, enforce standardization and enable fast database provisioning.
- Database ingestion – DBAs can quickly copy the database from a physical server into a virtualized database managed by vFabric Data Director, reducing the complexity usually associated with migrating a physical database into a virtual environment.
Automated Lifecycle Management
vFabric Data Director has a rich set of capabilities that help DBAs automate lifecycle management and improve productivity:
- Powerful Web-based management console – IT operators can manage thousands of databases through a single pane, significantly reducing management overhead.
- Database provisioning in minutes – Using database templates, vFabric Data Director helps you provision new data engines, including Oracle, SQL Server and Hadoop clusters, within minutes instead of days.
- Innovative cloning – The average production database uses six clones for development and test purposes. The linked database clone feature in vFabric Data Director reduces cloning time from days or weeks to minutes, regardless of the source database size.
- Policy compliance – It is important to ensure that sensitive data is not exposed to unauthorized users during copy creation, and to destroy each copy on a timely basis to control sprawl and release unused resources. With postclone scripts, DBAs can enforce procedures such as data masking to ensure compliance, and can implement retention policies that enforce deletion of copies.
- Database-aware high availability – vFabric Data Director provides single-click high availability for all databases by leveraging the underlying vSphere High Availability capabilities.
Self-Service
Database as a service becomes a reality with vFabric Data Director—a single platform that helps deliver self-service capabilities for heterogeneous data engines:
- Self-service database provisioning – Self-service database provisioning provides developers with database access in minutes while reducing IT operational costs.
- Self-service database management – Developers need the flexibility to perform basic database operations without involving DBAs. Using self-service capabilities, developers can perform common operations such as cloning, backup, snapshots and point- in-time restore with just a click.
- Robust role-based access control (RBAC) – RBAC restricts system access to authorized users. By assigning granular privileges, IT administrators can enable self-service while maintaining control and compliance.
Key Features
DBaaS architecture
- Scalable, elastic, multi-tenant
- Policy-driven CPU, memory and storage resource management
Self-service database provisioning, cloning, backup, and more
- Template-guided rapid provisioning
- Database-aware High Availability in a click
Innovative database cloning
- Linked database clone for instantaneous access
- Full database cloning for complete storage isolation
Comprehensive database backup and restore
- Database-consistent hot snapshots provide instant backups
- Hot external backups for durability
- Point-in-time recovery with both snapshots and external backups
Monitoring, Dashboards, and Reports
- Proactive monitoring, alerts, and notifications
- Comprehensive view of resource usage
REST APIs for integration with other provisioning and management tools
- vCloud Director, vFabric Application Director, Cloud Foundry, EMC Data Domain, and Greenplum Chorus
- Extensible to others
Deploy Hadoop clusters on vSphere in 10 minutes
- Deploy clusters with HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HiveServer and HBase
- Scale out as needed
Fully customizable configuration profile to meet your needs
- Dedicated machines or share with other workloads
- Shared or local storage
- Static IP or DHCP network
- Fully control the placement of Hadoop nodes
Speed up time to insight
- Upload/download data, run MapReduce job, Pig and Hive scripts from PC
- Consume data in HDFS through HiveServer SQL connection using existing tools
Boost up and dismiss compute capacity on demand
- Separate compute nodes from data without losing data locality
- Scale out and shutdown compute nodes on demand
- Spin up compute only clusters to analyze data in existing HDFS
Improved availability for Hadoop cluster
- One click to Highly Available NameNode and JobTracker to avoid single point of failure
- Fault-tolerance (FT) for NameNode and JobTracker
- One click HA for Hadoop tools Pig, Hive
- VMware vMotion to reduce planned downtime
Support multiple Hadoop 1.0 based distributions
- Apache Hadoop
- Cloudera Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH3)
- Greenplum HD 1.1 and 1.2
- Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP1)
Deployment:
VMware vFabric Data Director powers Database-as-a-Service for Your Cloud.
How To Buy:
The vFabric Data Director download includes vFabric Postgres 9.0
vFabric Data Director
Includes a license for 25 managed virtual machines. Support and subscription sold separately.
vFabric Postgres Standard Edition (Production Use)
Includes a license for 1 managed virtual machine with up to 2 vCPUs. If your Postgres database will have more than two vCPUs, divide by two and round up. For instance, a four vCPU Postgres database will require two Postgres licenses. A five vCPU Postgres database will require three Postgres licenses. Support and subscription sold separately.
VMware vFabric Data Director Requirements
VMware vFabric Data Director requires VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses and one instance of vCenter Server 5.0 Foundation or Standard. Learn more about VMware vCenter Server licensing and VMware vSphere licensing.
Support:
VMware Basic Support & Subscription
Weekday Support for Test, Dev and Non-Critical Deployments
- Global, 12x5 access to support
- Unlimited number of support requests
- Remote Support
- Online access to documentation and technical resources, knowledge base, discussion forums
- Product updates and upgrades
Overview
VMware Basic Support is designed for non-critical applications and platforms that require support during normal business hours. Our global support centers have been strategically placed to provide you with fast and efficient access to the support center in your region. Each center is staffed with engineers that can provide industry-leading expertise in virtualization and years of experience supporting virtual infrastructure products in real-world customer environments. We are committed to delivering enterprise-class, worldwide support with a single objective in mind: your success.
VMware Production Support & Subscription Service
Technical Support, 12 Hours/Day, per published Business Hours, Mon. thru Fri.
- Global, 24x7 support for Severity 1 issues
- Fast response times for critical issues
- Unlimited number of support requests
- Remote Support
- Online access to documentation and technical resources, knowledge base, discussion forums
- Product updates and upgrades
Overview
VMware Production Support is designed with your production environments in mind. Our global support centers are staffed around the clock to provide you access to our industry-leading expertise in virtualization and years of experience supporting virtual infrastructure products in real-world customer environments. We are committed to delivering enterprise-class, worldwide support with a single objective in mind: your success.
| Feature | Production Support | Basic Support |
|---|---|---|
| Hours of Operation1 | 24 Hours/Day 7 Days/Week 365 Days/Year |
12 Hours/Day Monday–Friday |
| Length of Service | 1 or 3 Years | 1 or 3 Years |
| Product Updates 2 | Yes | Yes |
| Product Upgrades 2 | Yes | Yes |
| Products Supported 3 | All Products (excluding VMware Fusion and VMware Player) |
All Products |
| Method of Access | Telephone/Web | Telephone/Web |
| Response Method | Telephone/Email | Telephone/Email |
| Remote Support | Yes | Yes |
| Root Cause Analysis | Available only with Business Critical or Mission Critical Support Offering | Available only with Business Critical or Mission Critical Offering |
| Access to VMware Web Site | Yes | Yes |
| Access to VMware Discussion Forums and Knowledge Base | Yes | Yes |
| Max Number of Technical Contacts per Contract | 6 | 4 |
| Number of Support Requests | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Target Response Times Critical (Severity 1) Major (Severity 2) Minor (Severity 3) Cosmetic (Severity 4) |
30 minutes or less: 24x7 4 business hours 8 business hours 12 business hours |
4 business hours 8 business hours 12 business hours 12 business hours |
| Business Hours North America Alaska, Hawaii Latin America Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) Asia, Pacific Rim, Japan (APJ) Australia/New Zealand |
Monday - Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT) 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (GMT/GMT+1) 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Singapore Time) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sydney AET) |
Monday - Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT) 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (GMT/GMT+1) 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Singapore Time) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sydney AET) |
1 Hours of operation for Gemstone are Monday – Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (PST/PDT). Severity 1 issues are responded to 24x7.
2 Product updates and upgrades are not included with Basic Support and Subscription Service for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for VMware.
Product updates and upgrades are not included with Production Support and Subscription Service for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for VMware.
3 VMware Fusion Professional and VMware Workstation require a minimum of ten (10) licenses in order to purchase Basic support. VMware Workstation requires a minimum of ten (10) licenses in order to purchase Production Support.
Documentation:
Download the VMware vFabric Data Director Datasheet (PDF).