Horizon Workspace - External vFabric Postgres database

Horizon Workspace - External vFabric Postgres database

Introduction

This paper details the setup scenarios for using VMware vFabric Postgres 9.1 for use with Horizon Workspace service-va to implement this service in HA mode or for production environments where external PostgreSQL database is a requirement.

This document covers Horizon Workspace 1.0 and 1.5.

vPostgres HA cluster setup and failover procedures is also included in v. 0.9

Problem description

When designing Horizon Workspace for production usage an external VMware VMware vFabric Postgres 9.1 is required.
VMware vFabric Postgres is not included as part of Horizon Workspace licenses and should therefore be bought separately from Horizon Workspace.
VMware vFabric Postgres is a new platform for most customers so little or no information exists on install, configure, scale and backup & restore operations of this platform.

Typically customer don't want to introduce a new DB platform - PostgreSQL is for most customers a new platform - and often this comes up as a show-stopper when discussing production implementations of Horizon Workspace as MSSQL or Oracle is the typical database deployed with enterprise customers which Horizon Workspace does not support in the initial release.

Attachments
Comments

Hi,

i found an error in the script used for the creation of the DB because there is a missing ";" after the command "ALTER ROLE horizon"

After adding the missing caracter it works ok.

Thank you - i have changed the document to include the " ; "

LFC

This seems to be a little short sighted of VMware. This license should be included in the Horizon Suite, or an alternative (more mainstream) DB platform such as MS SQL Server should be available. I would guess that not a single one of the many customers I represent will have internal PostgreSQL skills, and will therefore be reluctant to deploy a platform that depends on it.....

It's a 1.0 version and it's natural for VMware to use a product in their line to start with, but i think they agree with you since in the new 1.5 version they added support for Oracle and i'm sure they will add MSSQL soon enough.

The value of this document is that customers can use a virtual appliance to use as DB thus no need to learn much.

If you want to see the above document used in practice you can read this blog post: http://myvirtualife.net/2013/07/21/preparing-vpostgres-as-external-database-for-horizon-workspace/, you see it's pretty simple and anyone can do it.

In my opinion what they should do is support the Open Source version of PostgreSQL because at least customers will save money on licenses, but i understand this is a bit of a dream 🙂 What they could actually do is make a specific licensing for supporting DB needed buy VMware products only; for example if you use vPostgres only for deployed VMware products it should be much cheaper.

This document still doesn't contain any info as to how to configure the JDBC URL for use with a master slave cluster to enable failover. I had to ask in the vfabric forums and got this answer- https://communities.vmware.com/thread/455006 but i don't know if it applies to Workspace as I haven't had time to test it

When using Workspace with an external clustered Postgres database only the master should be entered in the JDBC configuration.

If a failover is required (promoting the slave to new master) this is done in postgres terms and once the new master is available for write operations the JDBC is changed accordingly from the Configurator UI and saved to the service-VA(s)

Version history
Revision #:
1 of 1
Last update:
‎04-10-2013 07:22 AM
Updated by: