Catalog Management needs overhaul!

[qc4vmware]

I figured I would start a discussion thread on here since I am not at all happy with the catalog management in this product and I am curious how many others share my views or love it as is.

I want what I call a "Master Catalog". I have created an organization that is nothing but a master catalog that is shared out to all organizations. This is where I am putting my very generic vApps. The type of thing probably all my organizations will want (W2K8, various linux images, LAMP stack, etc). We will likely create a second master that holds all the other apps we want to manage centrally and allow for org admins to copy these into their local catalogs. I feel like I am basically managing a big mess.

I would like to see:

• A central repository where I can replicate images out. VCD instances around the globe will want all of these vApps. I can probably handle this via scripting but I really don't want to.

• Central repository that I can advertise a subset of the catalog out to organizations as I see fit. Org XYZ gets apps 1,2,5,7 while org ABC gets apps 2,5,9 while big bad org gets the whole shebang.

I would also like to see a consolidated view of catalog items when I go to deploy. At the moment the view defaults to the organization catalog. I would like to be able to set the default behavior to show all items available to a user or set it to the shared view as suits my needs. It would be great if this was also something the user could adjust to fit how they work. This request is primarily related to working with the way I am currently managing my catalogs in the confines of how the product works today.

Thoughts?

[_morpheus_]

In my environment, I have one org with a published catalog that all other orgs can see, and this is where I put my master catalog of common vApps. Then I modified the vApp Author role and enabled "View Published Catalogs"

[qc4vmware]

Well yeah Morpheus that is what I am saying I have done as well but that is a horrible workaround in my opinion. It does not scale and has no granularity at all.

[depping]

Great feedback,

I know the Product Management team actively reads this community, I am certain they appreciate this and will add it to their very long list or feature requests

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCDX

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[mreferre]

To add on what Duncan was saying remember this is a 1.0 product. There are things that we saw but we didn't have time to put into the bits and things that we didn't see since this was a 1.0 product and we haven't had any chance (other than the private beta participants) to collect feedbacks yet.

What you are saying makes total sense in my opinion. For your info I have been playing around with the catalog in the last few days and translated a few paper notes into a blog post: http://it20.info/2010/09/vcloud-director-catalog-experiments/

Note the media templates behavior. Yes there is space for improvement.

Thanks.

Massimo Re Ferre'

VMware vCloud Architect

twitter.com/mreferre

www.it20.info

[cvbarney]

It seems like this feature request, a year ago, didn't make it to vCD 1.5?

I'm looking for a solution to provide some catalog templates to some customers, not all (public). And also customers who want to share catalog items.