If you have been following me for a while in my journal. I’ve now got one Organization (CorpHQ) with two Virtual Datacenters using two different resource allocation models:
That’s great. But one thing I’ve noticed is my catalog configuration doesn’t really mirror this setup. It strikes me that my “development” guys might be the ones tasked with building new applications in vApps, and once they have been shown to function correctly – they would perhaps go through a “staging” or “QA” vDC before then been deployed into production. Right-now I only have one catalog, associated with the Test/Dev Virtual Datacenter called “CorpHQ Catalog”. Some I’m going to do some pruning and grafting. Firstly, I’m going to rename the “Corp Catalog” and call it “Development Catalog” and then I’m going to create a “CorpHQ Catalog”. That’s a relatively simple configuration change.
Then I changed the permissions about a bit. Initially, I’d given everyone read rights to the 1st catalog I made which is now known as “Development Catalog”. It strikes me that only the development team should really have access to this. So I removed that privilege altogether…
I guess in the real world I would need an new set of groups – to allow “developers” to move vApps into the “QA” catalog, and for the QA people to be able to move vApp into the “CorpHQ Catalog”, and then for some to deploy them.
This means I now have two catalogs – Development which has 4 vApps, and CorpHQ which has none. I can move/copy vApps from one catalog to another by right clicking the vApp in the catalog and choosing the appropriate option:
The subsequent dialog box allows me to control the destination Catalog, Virtual Datacenter, and also what Storage type to locate it on.
This copy/move process can monitored from the destination catalog’s vTemplates tab:
Once copied into the catalog I can mark this copy as being a “golden master”, if I so which. It’s just a toggle option on the properties of any vApp. It doesn’t really do anything to the vApp itself. So its more a psychological distinction. If it’s “golden” you can trust it 100% if its just template, its just a template – and the tenant’s mileage could vary.
The next thing I wanted to do was make the “CorpHQ Catalog” available to my other Organizations (COIC, Quark, iStoxs and so on). The right to publish a catalog is controlled by the SysAdmin, but the publishing process can be carried out by the OrgAdmin. So before I did anything I confirmed that the CorpHQ Organization had the publishing privilege – that can be confirmed by navigating to Manage & Monitor, Organizations, Right-clicking the Organization and selecting properties – and checking the “Catalog Publishing” tab
Next as the OrgAdmin (in my case the account called rmoorcroft@corp.com) locate the catalog, and right-click it and select “Publish Settings”. This option DOES not appear in the UI UNLESS the option to “Allow publishing to all catalogs to all organizations” has been selected.
Then toggle the radio button like so:
The catalog list is refreshed with a “globe icon”, and should also appear in the “Public Catalog” area of other Organizations within the vCD instance:
So in the source Organization – we see the Globe icon…
and in the other Organization we can see the published catalog under “Public Catalogs” and it also indicates where that catalog originates from – in my case the CorpHQ location.
When your working in multiple Catalog and multiple Organization Virtual Datacenter (assuming you have the rights) this changes significantly the dialog boxes used to deploy a new vApp. So here for example I can see just the “Golden Masters” from the publish catalog or I can see all templates (including gold & non-gold templates)
Plus we can select to which Virtual Datacenter we wish to deploy the vApp as well through a drop-down list:
