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Creating a vSphere Content Library directly on Amazon S3

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A few years back I had blogged about creating your own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library enabling customers to take advantage of different types of storage backing than just vSphere Datastores. The primary requirement was that the content endpoint was accessible over HTTP(s), which meant that a number of solutions could be used from a simple web server like Nginx to an advanced distributed object store like Amazon S3 for example.

The workflow to create a 3rd Party vSphere Content Library on S3 is fairly straight forward, here is high level summary:

  1. Organize the content on a local system (desktop)
  2. Run a python script to index and generate the Content Library metadata
  3. Upload the Content Library to S3


A disadvantage of the above solution is that each time you need to update or remove content, the entire process would have to be repeated again, including re-uploading the changes. Not only was this time consuming from an operational standpoint but now you also needed to also keep a full copy of all the content locally which can be several hundred gigabytes, if not more.

This topic was recently brought back up again by Gilles Chekroun, an SE in our Networking and Security Business Unit who reached out to see if there was a solution to help his customer who was running into this challenge. Over the last couple of weeks, I had been working with both Gilles and Eric Cao (Content Library Engineer) on how we could enhance the existing Python script which indexes and generates the Content Library metadata to also support running directly on Amazon S3 bucket.

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Automating VM Template management using Content Library in VMC

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Today, the vSphere Content Library only supports a single deployable VM type using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. Although customers are familiar with both OVF and OVA (archive of OVF and VMDKs), support for vCenter VM Template is still one of the most highly requested feature for Content Library. This should come as no surprise since many of our customers have built operational procedures and automation workflows for managing VM deployments over the years and simply switching to another format has a significant impact to their existing workflows.

UPDATE (10/18/18) - The VMTX feature is now available in vSphere 6.7 Update 1

I know the Content Library team has been heads down working on a number of enhancements to Content Library and it looks like one of these improvements has recently made its way out onto VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which I had just noticed while working in my SDDC.


In VMC, when you right click on a VM and select "Clone as Template to Library", there will be a new option to capture a VM as a VM Template (VMTX) within a Content Library!

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Converting a vSphere Content Library from Subscriber to a Publisher?

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This is a blog post on some old Content Library research which I had looked into several months back for a customer inquiry and realized I never got a chance to write about. When you create a Subscriber Content Library (CL) which synchronize content from a Published CL, the Subscriber CL is basically in read-only mode. Not only can you not edit or modify the content, but the CL itself is also locked as a Subscriber forever. Why might this be a concern or an issue?

Consider the following scenario, where you have a single master CL that contains all the images you wish to distribute amongst your remote sites as efficiently as possible and ideally leveraging CL's built-in replication mechanism. Lets say the master CL is in Palo Alto and you have several vCenter Servers that can be configured as Subscriber CLs in Cork, Ireland. Instead of having configuring each Subscriber to pull remotely from PA, why not replicate that to a single Subscriber located in Ireland and re-publish that content locally to the remainder CL? The ideal workflow would look something like the diagram below.

However, today you can not simply convert a Subscriber CL to also become a Publisher CL. The only option that I could think of without relying on something like externally replicating a CL is to create an additional Published CL from the Subscriber CL. The idea is you would clone from your Subscriber CL in the same vCenter Server to a new Publisher CL and then that CL can then be used by the other local Subscriber CL as depicted in the diagram below.

This functionality currently does not exist in the vSphere Web/Flex Client, however it can be automated using the Content Library REST APIs. I had created a Content Library PowerCLI Module a few months back and one of the functions that would be useful for this workflow is the Copy-ContentLibrary.

The function is pretty straight forward to use, it accepts the name of a source CL that has already been configured as a Subscriber CL and the name of a new Published CL that you have created but is empty.


After that, the contents of the source CL will be copied into the destination CL as shown in the screenshot below.


Depending on the size of your CL, this can take some time but once it has completed, you should that your Published CL is now populated with content from your source CL.

The PowerCLI function also does a few additional things such as checking if a file already exists and will skip the file and move on to help with the copy.


If your intention is to only replicate from your master CL and then create a local publisher CL, there is an additional flag that you can set to $true called -DeleteSourceFile which will delete the files from the Subscriber CL. This is useful if you only have a single Datastore in which both the Subscriber and Publisher CL is storing, which means after the CL copy, you would be consuming 2x the storage as everything has been duplicated. For this particular customer, they only required an initial sync to populate content in their EMEA office and after that, they would be managing it local and not require additional replications from their master CL.