Content Library - Connect ISO to any VM within the vCenter. Do I really need a vCenter wide Shared Datastore?

[NicholasFarmer]

Content Library.  (stuck at 6.5 atm... so please forgive if this was fixed in 6.7u1) 

Uploaded some ISOs.

I would like to generate automation to mount an ISO to any Virtual Machine within the vCenter.

Currently, I can only do this to any VM running on an ESXi host that has access to the same datastore the Content Library is configured on.

If I have twenty Clusters, all with different datastore clusters, I would need twenty Content Library subscriptions (on each cluster datastore) for this to work?

Or even worse ( I feel ) having a single datastore mounted to every single host within the vcenter and parking the content library on that datastore.

I understand the complexity of mounting an ISO that is on a datastore the host cannot reach...

But we created the code to allow someone to connect an ISO from their Windows desktop to a VM (via the console client...)  Shouldn't the vCenter be able to broker this type of connection?

Any ideas or solutions anyone has came up with?

Nick

[daphnissov]

Yes, you need that datastore connected to any hosts that can consume those items, because a CL is backed by a datastore. It's really just a metadata layer/wrapper around a datastore folder. What I try and do is create a "utility" datastore and mount that to all hosts. That datastore isn't for anything other than content--whether that's backed by a CL or not. One of the reasons why that's actually helpful is because with vSphere templates, your hosts have direct access to those blocks over their storage fabric. If that weren't the case, those bits would have to be pushed across your Ethernet network through the management vmkernel interface to the destination host. Definitely much slower clone/deploy times in those cases.