News

Now Ready for Production: Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware

• By David Ramel
• 10/17/2019

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is now ready for production on the Amazon Web Services cloud, delivering AWS-managed relational databases in on-premises VMware environments.

After announcing a preview in September 2018, AWS this week announced its general availability.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed relational database service that works on many popular database engines. AWS says it enables the setup, operation and scaling of a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks.

An Oct. 16 blog post announced it's available for production, with initial support for Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, providing benefits including:

• Compute scaling
• Database instance health monitoring
• Failover
• OS and database patching
• The ability to provision new on-premises databases in minutes
• The ability to make backups, and restore to a point in time
• Automated management of on-premises databases, without having to provision and manage the database engine

The Amazon RDS on VMware site says: "Amazon RDS provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks including infrastructure provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups, freeing you to focus on your applications. RDS on VMware brings many of these same benefits to your on-premises deployments, making it easy to set up, operate, and scale databases in VMware vSphere private data centers."

Prerequisites to note as presented by the blog post include:

• Compatibility – RDS on VMware works with vSphere clusters that run version 6.5 or better.
• Connectivity – Your vSphere cluster must have outbound connectivity to the Internet, and must be able to make HTTPS connections to the public AWS endpoints.
• Permissions – You will need to have Administrative privileges (and the skills to match) on the cluster in order to set up RDS on VMware. You will also need to have (or create) a second set of credentials for use by RDS on VMware.
• Hardware – The hardware that you use to host RDS on VMware must be listed in the relevant VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide.
• Resources – Each cluster must have at least 24 vCPUs, 24 GiB of memory, and 180 GB of storage for the on-premises management components of RDS on VMware, along with additional resources to support the on-premises database instances that you launch.

RDS on VMware is available in the US East Region. More information is provided in a FAQ.