vSphere 6.0 blog – Multi Site Content Library

This is the third part of the new vSphere 6.0 improvements and or new features blog series. The first part covered the vMotion improvements and can be found here and the second part covered the vSphere Fault Tolerance feature and can be found here.

VMware vSphere 6.0 documentation page including release notes, installation documents, upgrade documents, component documentation and so on can be found here.

This part will cover the Multi-Site Content Library. For those of you knows me or follows (thank you all for following) my blog knows that i have worked quite a lot with vCloud Director (vCD) in the past and that i really liked the product.The way of providing end users with both virtual machine (VM) management capabilities and the same time content (read VM, VM Templates, ISO and Floppy) management capabilities was just amazing.

When VMware announced the new, read approximately 1 year old, direction of targeting vCD for service provides and vRealize Automation, which offers a lot of amazing features, for the non service providers they also said that existing vCD features will be migrated to either vRealize Automation or to vCenter Server.

You can think of the Multi-Site Content Library, which is a built in feature and not a plugin, as an extension of the content management feature in vCD. This feature makes it possible for vSphere Administrators to keep things like VM Templates, vApps, ISO images and also scripts synchronised across vCenter Server and also sites.
Guess you will save quite same time during e.g. VM Template patching if you got more than one vCenter Server and/or vCenter Server and site.

Content Library facts:

• Read/Write permissions are required for the vCenter Server and the library can be stored on e.g.
  • VMFS Datastore
  • NFS Datastore
  • CIFS share
  • local disk
• A maximum of 10 libraries and 250 items per library.

• When publishing content to one vCenter Server you can subscribe to the content form other vCenter Server. Almost like vCD 🙂
• Port 443 is used for Content Library communication and the bandwidth can be limited.
• Content can be deployed to a host or a cluster.
• VM’s are stored as OVF files. To update the OVF you need to deploy a VM from the OFV and then make a new package.

vSphere 6.0 configuration maximums can be found here.