Era Services for Database Engines | Nutanix Community
Skip to main content

Era offers the following key services for several database engines:

  • One-Click Provisioning.
  • Copy Data Management.
  • Database Protection.
  • One-Click Patching.

One-Click Provisioning

Era enables you to easily provision database environments (either production or otherwise) on your Nutanix clusters. Era provisioning service includes the following components:

VM Affinity and Antiaffinity Rule for AHV and ESXi (Database Server Cluster)

Era-provisioned cluster database VMs are assigned to nodes or hosts to maintain High Availability during the rolling upgrade of the cluster or host failure.

AHV uses the affinity rule. According to this rule, if one node or host goes down, then the database server VM hosted on that node moves to another node or host in the cluster.Example: The replication factor in a cluster is the parameter that defines the number of host failures to be tolerated. If the replication factor is set to two, then the cluster can tolerate one host failure. If the number of healthy hosts in the cluster is greater than the number of host failures that can be tolerated, then host-VM affinity is set to allocate hosts to each VM equal to the number of host failures to be tolerated plus one host.

Note: A healthy host has CPU and memory usage of less than 95 percent and is in a normal state

Suppose that there are H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5 healthy hosts available, and you must provision the database servers VM1, VM2, and VM3. Era assigns the database servers as follows:

  • VM1: H1, H2
  • VM2: H3, H4
  • VM3: H5, H1
ESXi uses the The VM-VM antiaffinity rule. When the number of healthy hosts is greater than or equal to the number of database server VMs to be created, then Era creates the VM-VM antiaffinity rule such that two database servers are not assigned to the same host.

Example: Suppose that there are H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5 healthy hosts available, and you must provision database servers VM1, VM2, and VM3. According to the VM-VM antiaffinity rule, Era assigns the database servers as follows:

  • VM1: H1
  • VM2: H2
  • VM3: H3

If one host fails, the database server on that host moves to the available host (H4 or H5).

Copy Data Management

Era enables you to clone your source databases (running on Nutanix clusters) and refresh the database clones by using snapshots or transaction logs.

Era uses storage-efficient and time-efficient Nutanix snapshots, thus lowering the cost of managing multiple copies of your databases. Era allows you to clone and refresh your clones to a point in time within minutes, making the clone and refresh operations highly time-efficient.

The Era copy data management service includes the following components:

  • Time machine. Collects logs and snapshots from the database. 
  • One-click cloning and refresh. Zero-byte database clones to any point in time. 

With Era, you can do the following.

  • Create copies of your production databases for dev-test, reporting, or auditing purposes.
  • Create copies (clones) of your databases on newly created database server VMs.

To use CDM, do the following:

  1. Register a source (production) database running on that Nutanix cluster with Era.

    When you register a database with Era, the database server VM (VM that hosts the source database) is registered with Era.

  2. Either register a target database server VM with Era, or create a database server VM during the cloning of the source database.

After you have registered a database with Era, a time machine is created for that database. The time machine takes periodic database snapshots and log catch-ups

The time machine performs the snapshot and log catch-up operations as defined in the SLA that you have selected or created during the registration of the database.

Database Protection

Protect your database with the consumer-grade database operations of Era to back up databases (of any size) in a full database-consistent manner within a matter of minutes.

With Era, you can do the following.

  • One-click snapshots for simplifying database rollback.
  • Explore your backup data through a robust time machine.
  • Back up your databases instantaneously with no overhead.

See Era Time Machine Management for more information.

One-Click Patching

Ensure data security with one-click patching to efficiently validate critical database updates. Era provides out-of-bond patching of databases to eliminate database configuration sprawls. All new database updates and patches are tested before publishing to the patch train.

For Oracle, see Patching an Oracle Database Server VM and Patching an Oracle Database Server Cluster.

For SQL Server, see Patching a SQL Server Database Server VM and Patching a SQL Server Database Server Cluster.

For PostgreSQL, see Patching a PostgreSQL Database Server VM and Patching a PostgreSQL Database Server Cluster.

 

Portal Documentation : Era Services

Terms & Conditions