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vCenter Server Identity Federation with Synology SSO

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I recently found another cool use case for my Synology NAS, which is using the Synology SSO application to setup vCenter Server Identity Federation. I had not considered looking at Synology, but I was recently setting up some additional DNS entries and noticed there was SSO Server application, that supports both SAML2 and OIDC.


For those with a Synology, this is a super easy way to get hands on experience with configuring vCenter Server Identity Federation and this can all run locally within your environment, unlike some of the other external identity providers which typically will require direct/in-direction connection to your vCenter Server or require a SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) proxy server.

Disclaimer: Synology SSO is currently not an officially supported vCenter Server IdP, please use at your own risk.

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How to setup Harbor registry on Synology

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With my recent exploration of GenAI and using a private ChatGPT solution with my own blog posts, I quickly realized in the space of AI/ML, the required software dependencies can take up a significant amount of storage, especially for a kubernetes/container-based deployment.

To give you an example, to deploy the private ChatGPT (h2ogpt) application using kubernetes, just the container image itself is a whopping 40GB+! 😲

Unfourntately, this is not a one off scenario but a common theme when working in the AI/ML space that the size of the packages and drivers are extremely large even when using containers. I figure I should probably setup my own container registry instead of pulling directly from the Internet given the size of these images.

I already have a local Harbor instance running in a VM but with my Synology, I have been using it centralize a number of functions and that would be the ideal place to actually run Harbor. While you can run individual containers on the Synology as I have demonstrated HERE with GitLab, the Harbor installation processes relies on Docker Compose, which Synology does not natively support using the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) interface.

With a little bit of tinkering and trial/error, I was able to finally get Harbor running on my Synology and centralize all my storage needs including having my own container registry.

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How to download offline copy of the Tanzu Kubernetes releases (TKr) Content Library?

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As part of the setup for vSphere with Tanzu, a local vSphere Content Library needs be created to store the various Tanzu Kubernetes releases (TKr) which users typically synchronize from VMware's online TKr Content Library repository.


I typically recommend configuring the content library subscription to only download files when needed, rather than the entire library, which is currently over 200GB+.

After standing up another vSphere with Tanzu environment, I needed to download additional TKr images but I could not reuse my existing subscribed content library since it was configured on a different vCenter Server.

With the ability to host a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology, I realized a better solution would be for me to simply download the full VMware TKr Content Library and host that locally on my network rather than re-downloading the same images each time I have a new deployment.

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