vRA Templates Mgmt Across Clusters

[mulliganesx]

We have over 9 clusters separated by different datacenters/vcenters.  My deployment workflow allows us to deploy a VM to any one of the clusters.

Currently we have a 2012, 2016, 2019 template for standard VM deployments, however unless I place a template for each Operating System in each datacenter it takes 40 minutes + for a VM deployment to kick off.

The alternative is having a copy of each template in each datacenter for each cluster but that is alot of templates and such to manage.  I also looked at using a Content Library, however this is not a supported feature in vRA.  Is there a better alternative to this?

vRA Version 7.6.

[vNerdyNate · Accepted solution]

I've dealt with the pain of multiple templates in each DC. That sweet 5 min deploy is nice though. It would be great to have content library at some point. Not much help, but alot of us want to see this added.

[mulliganesx]

Thanks... So it sounds like I will have to deploy a template to each cluster then, was hoping there was a better way!

[r0j]

You can use Codestream or LCM content pipelines to copy the templates between environments for you.

LCM has a vSphere Template Repository (under content settings) that uses vCenter content library.

I typically have the content in LCM bring over the vm template with my blueprint when releasing it to the different environments.

Also, you will need to expand the disk on your LCM/Codestream appliance to do this as templates can be Uge, but it does work.

[cjoshi]

Have you tried using VMFS/NFS datastores shared across all clusters. I had a similar problem, the workaround was to have a shared NFS datastore across multiple clusters. That did help to reduce the deployment times. Presenting the same datastore to multiple clusters is not a  very clean solution (nor a good practice), but at least it saves you the trouble of maintaining multiple copies of templates.

I would suggest using NFS instead of VMFS for such a workaround.

Thanks.

Regards Shekhar