For those of you who were fortunate enough to attend the Content Library Technical Deep Dive session (#5106) at VMworld Europe several weeks back and stayed until the very end, you were treated to an exclusive sneak peak demo. The demo was well received from what I heard, especially having been one of the most popular feature requests when talking to customers. I know the Content Library Engineering team has been working hard on this feature and I thought what better way than to show it off at VMworld!
I recently had a meeting with the Content Library Dev Manager (Pratima Rao) who also had presented at VMworld Europe and I just got the green light to share the demo with my readers. As a reminder, this is a Tech Preview and I encourage you to check out the disclaimer below if you have any questions related to the delivery of this feature 🙂 So without further ado, here is the Tech Preview video that was demo'ed at VMworld.
Note: There is no audio to the video, but for those interested in what is happening in the video, here is a quick summary. Today, you can upload and manage ISO images within the Content Library, however when trying to mount an ISO from the Content Library, the workflow is not as straight forward as it could be. In a future update of vSphere, you will now have a new option to directly mount an ISO from the Content Library. The demo starts off by showing some ISOs that have already been uploaded to an existing Content Library. We can then access those ISOs by going to the Virtual Machine settings and using the familiar mount ISO workflow to access the content. You will see that there is now a new option to mount an ISO from the Content Library and you will be presented with a filtered list of all files with .iso extension. Once you have selected the the ISO, the VM will mount it like you normally would from a vSphere Datastore or from the client system. Some additional things to note is that you can also filter by searching for specific content by using the search box in case you have multiple Content Libraries. Lastly, there are some useful metadata in the columns fields when looking through your ISOs which could help with further identifying the content you are interested in.
Disclaimer: This is an early Tech Preview and the overview of new technology represents no commitment from VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product. Features are subject to change, and must not be included in contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreement of any kind. Technically feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery. Pricing and packaging for any new technologies features discussed or represented have not been determined
Content Library Tech Preview at VMworld Europe 2015 from lamw on Vimeo.
Can't wait to install and test! Upgrading vCenter to vSphere 6 very soon after lots of testing. Glad to see this feature added.
Glad that VMware is listening and added this capability.
Do you know if they've added the ability to run customization scripts when deploying OVF templates, specifically for Windows servers?
They've not added Guest Customization (yet). Today, you can deploy and then right click on the VM using the vSphere Web Client and select Customize. I know this is something the team is aware of and working on
Pretty excited about content libraries, this should ease the misuse of my vCenters disks and possibly eliminate a sharepoint. How kind are the library syncornyzations to my network?
I have found this : https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2015/09/efficiently-synchronize-import-export-content-vmware-vsphere-content-library.html which probobly provides a good speedup indication. I am more concerned with slightly changed templates. If we patch a template and put it back into the content library, can I expect a delta transfer? How about some versioning?
I know this is the first release of content libraries, but I see much potential. Automating these library syncornizations will save much human time, even if it has to smash old templates.