Part 2 | vCloud Connector 2.7 – Content Library replication

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Hello again to all interested in vCloud technologies. In the second part of this presentation I will walk through some of the functions available with vCloud Connector and use cases as well as some basic troubleshooting steps.

In Part 1 we covered the initial installation and configuration, and we can start with functions that are coming with vCloud Connector.

Let’s start with Content Library replication.

Content Library replication is a function that will help system administrators to manage and distribute their templates from one centralized location to other destinations.

In our scenario I have a folder “Templates” in vCenter server where I will store my template CentOS VM with some already installed packages on it.

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As additional requirement for Content Library Replication we need to have a catalog object in vCloud Air (respectively vCloud Director)

Here how we can do that form vCloud Air:

From vCloud Air Portal go to your VPC and select the link “Manage Catalogs in vCloud Director”

Pict2

Then select the + button “Add Catalog”

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Provide Name of the catalog, if needed share the catalog with other members. Once completed the wizard page should look like this:

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The New catalog is created, as you can see the catalog is starting with number of versions 1, this count will increase once we start catalog uploads as new versions of the files are uploaded.

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The Catalog should be empty – no other manually uploaded templates. For indication of empty Catalog is the row Version with value 1, once we upload a template to the cloud the value will increase showing the number of new versions in the catalog.

Now as we have all needed components for synchronization, we can start with the wizard:

From vCenter server  Select vCloud Connector in Solutions and Applications then expand the Local Node and select template folder that we created. Under actions select Publish to Content Library:

Pict6To confirm the folder is available we can go to Content Library Tab and check if the folder is available, with this step we select the source folder that will be used for future replications, this folder will be monitored for changes in future.

Pict7As next step we need to connect this folder to a catalog in vCloud Air (vCloud Director) select the Template folder and click on Subscribe button on the top.

Pict8This will initiate wizard to add all needed details:

  1. Select the target cloud in our example it is Remote Node VPC
  2. Tick Remove Entities if deleted at publisher (this option will keep exact match of the content of your Template folder with the Catalog
  3. Select the Desired Catalog container and go for next stepPict9
  4. Select the available VDC and select nextPict10
  5. Update your schedule. There are two main options, to use hourly synchronization or select desired days of the week and time to start the replication. For bigger templates where the process might be time consuming it might be better to offload the task for end of day to avoid utilization of the network during peak hours.
    Pict11
  6. Check the summary and complete the wizardPict12

Once completed the wizard no replication will be started as we selected scheduled start at 18:00, the content library replication will be started in the evening, however if we want to test our setup we can initiate synchronization with Sync Now button:

Pict13And then select which replication we would like to synchronize:

Pict14As result of the Sync Now we can see a task in the Recent Tasks showing the export of the template to OVF. Clicking on refresh button on top left corner you can see the task from vCloud Connector in progress

Pict15Pict16Hovering the mouse over the task we can see the progress of the Synchronization:

Pict17This window provide information about source and destination Export progress as well as transferred and imported size. In this example we can see that export to OVF is progressing to 185 MB out of 562 MB, transferred so far to the cloud is 84 MB and imported is 82.5 MB. Values in brackets show what is the change since the last update every 30 sec the values are calculated. In vCloud Air we can see the task running and import is showing 1 %. Once the Sync task is completed we can see in the task pane that exported, transferred and imported tasks that were running simultaneously are complete:

Pict18In vCloud Air we can see the that our catalog have updated the version and now shows 2, as well as we can see our template inside the catalog

Pict19Pict20In conclusion vCloud connector can be used very effectively to synchronize your templates across many locations, you need to keep only one actual version and you can set scheduled replication between your source and more than one destination, it is needed only to subscribe your folder to desired catalogs or folders. Same process can be started in opposite direction from Cloud to OnPrem, as well you can subscribe one catalog to many destinations.

In the next part will show how you can copy vAPP from one VPC with vCloud Connector to another using advanced network settings.

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Kalin is Cloud Services Engineer at VMware, he has over 4 years experience in Virtualization field. Before joining VMware he was part of Center of Excellence at IBM. His main scope of work in VMware is closely related with the cloud solution and consultation with clients looking to adopt Hybrid Cloud for their business needs. He has a master degree in engineering from Technical University of Varna and holds several IT industry leading certifications like VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, and others.

About Kalin Hadzhivelikov

Kalin is Cloud Services Engineer at VMware, he has over 4 years experience in Virtualization field. Before joining VMware he was part of Center of Excellence at IBM. His main scope of work in VMware is closely related with the cloud solution and consultation with clients looking to adopt Hybrid Cloud for their business needs. He has a master degree in engineering from Technical University of Varna and holds several IT industry leading certifications like VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, and others.
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One Comment

  1. Have you ever found a way to modify subscription settings after the subscription has been created using the Wizard?

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