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Benefits of VM Templates (VMTX) in vSphere Content Library

05.16.2023 by William Lam // 12 Comments

A commonly miss-understood capability of the vSphere Content Library is managing and distributing Virtual Machine Templates (VMTX), which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 Update 2.

When vSphere Content Library was first released in vSphere 5.0, content was distributed by using a pull-based replication where the subscriber vCenter Server would setup initiate the content subscription to the publisher vCenter Server and then content would then be downloaded to the subscriber vCenter Server as shown in the diagram below.


This initial architecture of vSphere Content Library made it extremely easy for any vCenter Server, regardless of their vCenter Single Sign-On domain, to create a subscription and download content (ISO, OVF/OVA and other files) from the vSphere Content Library of the publisher vCenter Server.

The creation of the vSphere Content Library subscription was managed completely by the individual subscribing vCenter Server as long as it knew the subscription URL and any credentials that may have been configured and of course connectivity to the publisher vCenter Server. While this made it easy for anyone to subscribe content from a vSphere Content Library, it also meant for larger organizations with many vCenter Server(s), an additional task was required to configure each subscribing vCenter Server.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // content library, vmtx

Quick Tip - Correctly naming TKR's in Local Content Library for vSphere with Tanzu in vSphere 8

09.28.2022 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Customers can create a Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) content library by either subscribing to VMware's online repository or by creating a local content library and manually importing the images, which can be useful for air-gapped or non-internet accessible environments.

If you automatically subscribe to VMware's online repository, the TKR images (OVF) will automatically be downloaded and will be stored with a default item name that looks like the following:


However, when creating a local content library, customers must manually import the OVF images after downloading them from VMware's online repository (https://wp-content.vmware.com/v2/latest/). During the OVF import wizard, you will notice that each TKR has the same default name called "photon-ova" and you will most likely rename it to something more useful.


Prior to vSphere 8, you could use any name and vSphere with Tanzu would not care as there is metadata associated within each TKR image that provides version that is needed when creating a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster (TKC).

I was attempting to deploy a TKC using a new TKR version, which I needed to download and import into my vSphere 8 environment and that is where I ran into a strange error:

[Read more...]

Categories // VMware Tanzu, vSphere 8.0 Tags // content library, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, vSphere 8.0, vSphere with Tanzu

Quick Tip - vSphere with Tanzu fails to sync Content Library with 500 Internal Server Error

09.19.2022 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

While setting up a new vSphere with Tanzu environment (which can run with just 32GB of memory), I ran into a really strange issue where my vSphere Content Library templates were not being picked up by the VM Service. I was going insane as I have configured this a number of times and I have never ran into this particulare issue before. I thought maybe it was a configuration problem but the enablement of vSphere with Tanzu was 100% successful and everything was showing green.

While looking at the vmware-system-vmop-controller-manager container log, I noticed that the VM Service can see the template but it just fails to extract and process it and throws a 500 Internal Server Error message:

E0917 12:08:23.060929 1 content_library_provider.go:275] vsphere/contentlibrary "msg"="error extracting the OVF envelope from the library item" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "contentLibraryUUID"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "itemName"="ubuntu-22.04-custom-image"
E0917 12:08:23.060984 1 content_library_provider.go:275] vsphere/contentlibrary "msg"="error extracting the OVF envelope from the library item" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "contentLibraryUUID"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "itemName"="photon-ova"
E0917 12:08:23.060998 1 contentsource_controller.go:203] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="failed to get VirtualMachineImage from content library" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "clProviderName"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "clProviderUUID"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6"
E0917 12:08:23.061011 1 contentsource_controller.go:203] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="failed to get VirtualMachineImage from content library" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "clProviderName"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "clProviderUUID"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3"
E0917 12:08:23.061032 1 contentsource_controller.go:401] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="Error in syncing image from the content provider" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3"
E0917 12:08:23.061079 1 controller.go:317] controller/contentsource "msg"="Reconciler error" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="1bfd8950-c846-46cf-bd50-55150a16bab3" "namespace"="" "reconciler group"="vmoperator.vmware.com" "reconciler kind"="ContentSource"
E0917 12:08:23.061123 1 contentsource_controller.go:401] controllers/ContentSource "msg"="Error in syncing image from the content provider" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6"
E0917 12:08:23.061165 1 controller.go:317] controller/contentsource "msg"="Reconciler error" "error"="POST https://vcsa.tanzu.local:443/rest/com/vmware/content/library/item/download-session: 500 Internal Server Error" "name"="a298369b-7239-4b1c-988f-d361e5a001d6" "namespace"="" "reconciler group"="vmoperator.vmware.com" "reconciler kind"="ContentSource"

I was running out of ideas and things to try and I decided to look at the content library configuration to see if I had missed something.

[Read more...]

Categories // VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // content library, ovf, vSphere with Tanzu

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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