VM Templates

[LooseMoose]

In our current vCenter only environment, we deploy new VM's for clients based off a pre-built template that has a bunch of customisations geared towards our market segment. I'd like to achieve the same in vCD but I cannot find any way of adding the templates into vCD and presenting to tenants. There's no documentation so I suspect it's not possible, is this accurate?

Thanks.

[patriccc]

Hi. I am little new on this but i think that you can share the templates to tenants. In the public catalogs you can share this.

You can share with specific tenants or to all tenants.

I have this configured from who have setup my system. So i don't really now how he doing that. But you can.

I think you must setup a organization to allow share the catalogs.

I hope that you mean this function.

[cfor]

You can setup a catalog in a master organization and configure it to be shared.  This is done by opening the catalog settings and selecting to share will "All Organizations" in a read-only fashion.  This will allow the Organization Administrators for your tenants to be able to copy these images into the catalogs they provide to their users.  This way still ensuring the tenant administrator has control over what content their users have access to, but allowing you to create gold base images they can use.

You can either create these "base" images in VCD or import from vCenter.  (It is also possible to create with something like packer and using the vCloud API, or powershell, import a created OVF into the catalog once you have created it).

[LooseMoose]

Thanks for your reply, sorry if I'm not fully understanding but I'm still learning this.

When you say 'setup a catalog in master organisation' I don't appear to have this option under the system organisation. All I have with regards to catalogs is to 'Add a catalog to an organisation' and this requires me to select a tenant to create it with.

Note, I'm on vCD 9.0 if that makes any difference.

Thanks.

[mjha]

@LooseMoose

You can follow below steps to achieve what you are looking for:

1: Create a new organization. Lets name it sevrice_vdc

2: Open properties of this Org and make sure Following buttons are check marked

3: Create a VDC under newly created Org. For simplicity I have kept the same name in my lab

4: Navigate to Catalogs tab and Create a new Catalog named "Public Catalog" or whatever name you want to keep

5: Right click on newly created catalog and select Publish/Subscribe Settings

6: Go to sharing tab and click on Add Organizations and based on your requirements select the list of Orgs with which you want to share the contents from newly created catalog in previous step

7: From storage tab select the storage policy on which you want to store your contents that will be uploaded in the catalog

8: Add contents to your catalog

9: Now if you navigate to other Org > Catalog > Public Catalogs, you will see the newly added template there

Hope this helps you.

[LooseMoose]

Thanks Manish, exactly what I was after.

The only issue I have now is when selecting the template to use. If I select my vCenter, I'm unable to see any templates for use to add into the catalog.

I gave the vCD service specific permissions to the template but still no joy.

*EDIT*: I had a thought, so created a blank VM in vCenter and it shows up when importing in vCD. Can vCD not understand template VM's? Presumably I'd need to convert the template to a VM and then import it?