Virtual Machine to RDS Database Integration

Just like customers are able to use EC2 Instances with VMware virtual machines, our virtual machines can take advantage of the Relational Database Service (RDS) and connect to databases in AWS.

Create a new Virtual Machine

1. Login to your Cloud SDDC vCenter
2. Click ‘Menu’ and select ‘Content Libraries’
3. Select the ‘vExpert-Content-Library’ and click ‘Templates’
4. Right-Click ‘Lychee-Automated-Demo’ and click ‘New VM from This Template’
5. Name your VM ‘Frontend-With-RDS’
6. Expand ‘SDDC-Datacenter’
7. Select the ‘Workloads’ folder
8. Click ‘Next’
9. Expand ‘Cluster-1’, select ‘Compute-ResourcePool’ and click ‘Next’
10. Click ‘Next’ on the ‘Review Details’ page
11. Select the ‘WorkloadDatastore’
12. Select the ‘sddc-cgw-network-1’ Destination Network
13. Click ‘Next’
14. Click ‘Finish to deploy the VM
15. Once the VM is deployed, Power-on the VM

Create an RDS MySQL Instance

1. Open the AWS Console
2. Click ‘Services’ and select ‘RDS’
3. Click ‘Get Started Now’
4. Select ‘MySQL
5. Click ‘Next’
6. Select ‘Dev/Test – MySQL’, then click ‘Next’
7. Scroll down to ‘DB instance class’
8. Select ‘db.t2.micro’
9. Scroll down to ‘Settings’
10. Configure the following settings:
    • DB instance identifier = ‘vmc’
    • Master username = ‘vmcadmin’ o Master password = ‘VMware1!’
11. Click ‘Next’
12. In ‘Network & Security’, select the VPC that is connected to your SDDC
13. Ensure ‘Public accessibility’ is set to ‘No’
14. Select the Availability Zone where you deployed your SDDC
15. Choose existing VPC security groups and ensure the Security Group you configured earlier is selected.
16. Under ‘Database options’
17. Name the database ‘MySQL_VMC’
18. Scroll down to ‘Backup’
19. Change the ‘Backup retention period’ to ‘0 days’
20. Scroll to the bottom and click ‘Launch DB instance’
21. Click ‘View DB instance details’
22. Refresh the page periodically until ‘DB instance status’ shows ‘available’
23. Scroll down until you see the ‘Endpoint’ address
24. Keep this tab available and go back to vCenter Server

Launch the Frontend Virtual Machine

1. Click on the ‘Frontend-With-RDS’ VM
2. Click ‘Launch Web Console’
3. Select the new tab with the web console and login to the ubuntu VM
4. Login with credentials:
   • User: brian
   • Password: VMw@re123
5. Open Firefox and go to ‘127.0.0.1’
6. Here our web application is asking for the database credentials for our RDS instance.
   • RDS Endpoint Address
   • Username = ‘vmcadmin’
   • Password = ‘VMware1!’
   • Database name = ‘MySQL_VMC’
7. Click ‘Connect'
8. Enter the following credentials:
   • User = ‘vmc’
   • password = ‘vmc’
9. Click ‘Create Login’

You’ve now successfully connected a front-end VM to and RDS database. To test out this app, you can either request a public IP, add an http firewall rule, and NAT rule to this VM, or you can move on to the next section on using Application Load balancers and apply the same steps there, with the private IP of this VM.

When you are finished, select your ‘vmc’ RDS instance and click ‘Instance Actions’ and select ‘Delete’ to avoid additional hourly charges for the instance.