Last week at VMworld, I co-presented a Technical Deep Dive on vSphere's Content Library feature (INF5106) which was first introduced in our vSphere 6.0 release. One of the demos that I showed case was the 3rd Party Content Library capability which allows you to publish your own Content Library without the need of a vCenter Server. For those of you who attended in person, you may have recalled that I had used a Docker Container to quickly standup an Nginx endpoint for hosting my 3rd Party Content Library.
I have just published my Docker Container called lamw/tp-content-library-demo on Dockerhub . If you wish to build the Docker Container yourself, you can take a look at my Github project vmworld2015-3rd-party-content-library for more details. You can also subscribe to my other 3rd Party Content Library which includes variety of Nested ESXi OVF Templates, for more details you can take a look at the blog post here.
Requirements:
- Linux Container Host for running the Docker Container like VMware Photon for example
- vSphere 6.0 environment
Instructions:
Step 1 - Download the 3rd Party Content Library Docker Container by running the following command:
docker pull lamw/tp-content-library-demo
Step 2 - Start the Docker Container by running the following command:
docker run -d -p 80:80 lamw/tp-content-library-demo
Step 3 - Verify that the Nginx webserver is properly running by visiting the following URL (replace with the IP Address/Hostname of your Container Host): http://192.168.1.143/vghetto/
If everything was setup correctly, you should see a variety of files from our sample 3rd Party Content Library along with the various JSON metadata files describing the library itself.
Step 4 - To subscribe to the 3rd Party Content Library, go ahead and create a new Content Library using the vSphere Web Client and start off by specifying the name of the Content Library you wish to create.
Step 5 - Next, go select the "Subscribed content library" option and paste in the following URL: http://[CONTAINER-HOST-IP]/vghetto/lib.json which is the 3rd Party Content Library endpoint running in our Docker Container.
Step 6 - Lastly, go ahead and select a storage backing for the library. In this case, I have selected a vSphere Datastore and then click finish to create the library.
Once the Content Library has successfully been created, we can then click into it to see that we are no subscribing to the 3rd Party Content Library that we had just hosted on our Nginx Docker Container as seen in the screenshot below.
If you are interested to learning more about the Content Library feature, we will be repeating the Content Library Technical Deep Dive session at VMworld EMEA for those of you who will be attending. Hope to see you there!
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