WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud Foundation
  • VKS
  • Homelab
    • Resources
    • Nested Virtualization
  • VMware Nostalgia
  • Apple

Hope to see you at VMworld 2015

06.23.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

The VMworld 2015 Content Catalog just went live this morning and I am please to announce that I have two sessions that were accepted at both VMworld US and Europe. The first session will be a Technical Deep Dive on our new Content Library feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.0 and I will be co-presenting that with James Chang, one of the Content Library Engineers. The second session will be covering a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and I will be covering some of the best practices along with some of the tips and tricks that you may not know about the VCSA. I hope to see you in one of these sessions and I look forward to meeting and chatting with some of my readers at VMworld!

INF5106 - Content Library Technical Deep Dive

What’s the best place to store and maintain your VM templates, ISOs, and vApps? How do you share them with other administrators and users in your organization or between two sites? The solution is a content library, a content management tool within vCenter that manages and replicates content across data centers. In this talk you will learn how to organize your VM templates for the best VM provisioning speed, pick up best practices for automatically sharing your content between sites, and understand how to migrate content from your existing vCloud Director to vCenter with the least amount of effort. And all this right from the vSphere client that you are already familiar with! Next, we will dive into advanced features like external webserver support (e.g. Amazon S3), HTTP mirroring for scale, and rapid sync using array replication technologies. Lastly, we will conclude the talk with a product demonstration showcasing the advanced content management and consumption use cases within a software defined data center

INF4528 - vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks

In this session, I will go through some of the best practices and considerations when deploying and managing the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I will walk through some of the changes between past releases and the new vSphere 6.0 release. In addition, I will also provide tips and tricks on using the VCSA as well as ways in migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the VCSA

Categories // VCSA, VMworld, vSphere 6.0 Tags // content library, vcenter server appliance, VCSA, vmworld

Creating your own 3rd Party Content Library for vSphere 6.0 & vCloud Director 5.x

06.02.2015 by William Lam // 21 Comments

If you recall a few weeks back, I had shared a custom vGhetto Content Library that I had created that contains a collection of my Nested ESXi and VSAN OVF Templates that anyone with a vSphere 6.0 or vCloud Director 5.x environment could subscribed to. This custom Content Library is also known as a 3rd Party Content Library and is one of the capabilities that I am most excited about with the new Content Library feature in vSphere 6.0. The reason I think this is such a cool capability is that I believe it opens up a wide range of use cases not only for our customers but also for our partner eco-systems enabling ease of content management and content distribution for VMware customers.

Just imagine, a vendor who might be providing Virtual Appliances (OVF/OVA), ISOs, VIBs, patches, workflows, blueprints, scripts, etc. can host a 3rd Party Content Library and as a customer you can easily subscribe to a particular repository. Once subscribed, you can either have the content automatically downloaded or synchronized on-demand. In fact, customers can also create their own 3rd party Content Library and distribute their own content within their own organization (local and remote sites) and even be able to share it with others in the VMware community.

Before I jump into the process of creating your own 3rd Party Content Library, I wanted to quickly go over the different options for publishing and subscribing to a Content Library. Below is a diagram to help you visualize the different options you have for publisher and subscriber sources.

vsphere-6.0-class-content-library-as-a-service
Here is the same information as shown in the diagram but in a table format:

Publisher Subscriber
vCenter Server vCenter Server
vCloud Director vCenter Server
3rd Party vCenter Server
3rd Party vCloud Director

Note1: Although the diagram technically shows a 5th scenario where a vCenter Server is the publisher and vCloud Director is the Subscriber, this particular flow is not entirely functional at the moment. Though it will work, it will only allow you to sync non-VM Templates and a different version of the script would be needed. This is a known issue and hopefully it will be resolved in a future update within vCloud Director.

Note2: For 2nd scenario where vCloud Director is a Publisher and vCenter Server is a Subscriber, On-Demand synchronization and overriding an existing OVF Library is currently not supported.

Here is the high level workflow for creating your own 3rd Party Content Library:

  1. Create directory structure layout for your content
  2. Create the JSON metadata index
  3. Publish the 3rd Party Content Library using HTTP(s)
  4. (Optional) Periodically update the JSON metadata index on new or updated content

Step 1 - Here is an example of what your directory structure layout should look like:

creating-third-party-content-library-0
Step 2 - To assist with the JSON metadata indexing, Eric Cao, one of the Content Library Engineers was kind enough to provide the following Python script called make_vcsp_2018.py which you will need to download onto a system which has the Python interpreter running

UPDATE (07/26/18) - You can also create 3rd party content library directly on Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure Blob using the updated versions of the script make_vcsap_2018.py and  make_vcsap_2022.py respectively

UPDATE (05/29/17) - Thanks to Eric, the script now supports both Python2/3 as well as a new 4th optional command-line argument for performing md5check (Default: true)

Step 3 - The make_vcsp_2018.py script accepts two arguments: the first is the display name of the Content Library and the second argument is the path to the root directory of your Content Library. Here is an example:

python make_vcsp_2018.py vghetto-content-library /Users/lamw/desktop/vghetto-content-library

Once the script has finished building the metadata index, we can now take a look at our content and you will notice some additional files that have been added to your Content Library directory as seen in the screenshot below:

creating-third-party-content-library-1
You will notice two new files at the root directory of your 3rd Party Content Library. The first is the items.json which provides reference to all the files within the library and you will see that each subsequent directory will also contain an individual item.json file describing the content within the local directories. The lib.json is the 3rd Party Content Library endpoint and is what you will be specify when subscribing to a 3rd Party Content Catalog and by providing the absolute URL to this file when setting up a new Content Library.

Step 4 - To publish the 3rd Party Content Library, you just need to host the content somewhere that supports HTTP(s), this can be as simple as using a regular Web Server to something like an Object Store such as Amazon S3.

Note: If you plan to use a non-traditional Web Server for hosting your 3rd Party Content, ensure that the root URL is the same for accessing all files and can not change. For example, you will not be able to host a 3rd Party Content Library using Dropbox as the root URL changes for each and every file.

Step 5 (Optional)- Periodically you will most likely want to add new content and files to your 3rd Party Content Library and as part of that process you will also need to update the metadata index. You can easily do so by re-running the make_vcsp_2018.py script against your existing 3rd Party Content Library. The script will only generate new metadata index for files that have been newly added and for any changes to existing files, the appropriate metadata files will only updated.

As you can see the process in creating and publishing a 3rd Party Content Library is pretty straight forward and simple. I hope to see more of our partners start to publish their own 3rd Party Content Libraries, I think it would be extremely beneficial for VMware customers and I look forward to hearing about them :). If you have created your own 3rd Party Content Library and would like to share the details, feel free to leave a comment and I will be aggregating a list below so that you can easily find them all in one place.

Published 3rd Party Content Libraries

Author Library Content Link
William Lam Nested ESXi & VSAN OVF Templates Subscribe to vGhetto Nested ESXi Template Content Library in vSphere 6.0
Alan Renouf Some sample OVF/OVAs Subscribe to Alan's Content Library in vSphere 6.0

Categories // vSphere 6.0 Tags // content library, vcd, vcloud director, vSphere 6.0

Quick Tip - Using HTTP(s) proxy for connecting to 3rd party Content Library in vSphere 6.0

05.27.2015 by William Lam // 11 Comments

A couple of weeks back I was asked by a customer who was interested in subscribing to my 3rd Party Content Library which hosted several of my Nested ESXi and VSAN OVF Templates. The problem was that in his environment, like many others, he did not have direct access internet access from within vCenter Server for the Content Library subscription to be created. The customer was wondering if the Content Library feature supported a proxy server which is a very common method for Enterprise customers to provide access to external sites requiring internet access. The Content Library Service does provide a way to configure a proxy server and below are the instructions for configuring both the VCSA and vCenter Server for Windows.

UPDATE (09/27/17): As of vSphere 6.5 Update 1, the Proxy Configurations for the Content Library has been pulled directly into the service itself and you no longer have to manually edit the Java wrapper.conf files. You can now access the proxy configurations by using the vSphere Web Client going to Administration->System Configuration->Services->Content Library Service->Transfer Service as shown in the screenshot below. For 6.0 and 6.5, you will need to continue to follow the instructions below on editing the wrapper.conf file.

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)

The configuration file that you will need to edit is /usr/lib/vmware-vdcs/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf and below are the three lines to add:

wrapper.java.additional.20=-Dhttps.proxySet=true
wrapper.java.additional.21=-Dhttps.proxyHost=proxy.server.com
wrapper.java.additional.22=-Dhttps.proxyPort=8080

Once you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the Content Library service for the changes to go into effect by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/vmware-vdcs restart

The proxy server will now be used and assuming the proper ACL's have been added on the proxy server itself to allow traffic from your vCenter Server to the appropriate destination site, you should now be able to use the Content Library to subscribe to my 3rd Party Content Library.

vCenter Server for Windows

The configuration file that you will need to edit is C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\vdcs\wrapper\conf\wrapper.conf and below are the three lines to add:

wrapper.java.additional.20=-Dhttps.proxySet=true
wrapper.java.additional.21=-Dhttps.proxyHost=proxy.server.com
wrapper.java.additional.22=-Dhttps.proxyPort=8080

Once you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the Content Library service for the changes to go into effect by going to the Windows services panel.

content-library-service

Categories // VCSA, vSphere 6.0 Tags // content library, proxy, proxy server, vCenter Server, vcenter server appliance, VCSA, vcva

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • Next Page »

Search

Thank Author

Author

William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

Connect

  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
  • Quick Tip - Validating Broadcom Download Token  05/01/2025
  • Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling 04/23/2025
  • vCenter Identity Federation with Authelia 04/16/2025
  • vCenter Server Identity Federation with Kanidm 04/10/2025

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2025

 

Loading Comments...