Content library hack(DB)

VMware Content library, A unique way to make VM templates/ISO’s available across multiple vCenter’s. However, It does not handle Datacenter segregation very well when storing the contents on NFS/VMFS.

A subscribed library would need dedicated storage space and would be pointless in my setup as I had presented the NFS volume to all host.

So what seems to be the problem?

I have an NFS volume presented across all the host across several Data center. Although the NFS UUID and the name of the datastore are the same (ISO), on the vCenter database, this is stored with a different datacenter ID as they are segregated by the datacenter object.

  id  |      name      | datacenter_id
 -----+----------------+---------------
  157 | Template       |            77
  158 | SlowBro_400    |            77
  159 | ISO            |            77
  160 | SharedLUN      |            77
  161 | 10.154         |            77
  156 | template       |            77
   13 | SlowBro_legasy |             2
   14 | 10.128         |             2
   91 | ISO            |             2
   16 | Template       |             2
   92 | is-tse-d129_1  |             2
   12 | SlowBro_400    |             2

VCDB=# select * from vpx_entity where id=77;
  id |     name     | type_id | parent_id
 ----+--------------+---------+-----------
  77 | BLR          |       8 |         1
 (1 row)


VCDB=# select * from vpx_entity where id=2;
  id |    name    | type_id | parent_id
 ----+------------+---------+-----------
   2 | HYD        |       8 |         1
 (1 row)

With this configuration, When I had created a content library, as per the db, this was only referencing to once of the site datastore, IE: we only see iso (id 159) from BLR (id 77) datacenter.

What this means is The content library objects can only be deployed to one of the datacenter rather than being able to deploy them across all datacenter’s on the vCenter.

VCDB=# select * from cl_storage;
                  id                  |                          storageuri                          |   type
--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------+-----------
 a0018db8-f630-4c04-b0f1-30c900ad691c | Datastore:datastore-159:481639ff-d88d-4622-8872-ec6856e6b157  | Datastore
 bf8e8dcb-5b28-4b03-863e-89308bc8c501 | Datastore:datastore-157:481639ff-d88d-4622-8872-ec6856e6b157 | Datastore


The above table references:
VCDB=# select * from cl_library_storage;
              library_id              |              storage_id
--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
 3336e2ad-8166-4e6a-850d-a9d81c41ba01 | a0018db8-f630-4c04-b0f1-30c900ad691c
 946cea65-5cd0-41e0-83ab-17259f690ce1 | bf8e8dcb-5b28-4b03-863e-89308bc8c501

So.. Logically, If I add the other ID for ISO on this table cl_storage and create a referencing record in cl_library_storage then we should be able to use the same content library across all datacenter.

The ID from the above must be unique and must match the two tables. I added the below records (i added another record by incrementing one of the values after the co-relating table.

after change
VCDB=# select * from cl_storage;
                  id                  |                          storageuri                          |   type
--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------+-----------
 a0018db8-f630-4c04-b0f1-30c900ad691c | Datastore:datastore-159:481639ff-d88d-4622-8872-ec6856e6b157  | Datastore
 bf8e8dcb-5b28-4b03-863e-89308bc8c501 | Datastore:datastore-157:481639ff-d88d-4622-8872-ec6856e6b157 | Datastore
 bf8e8dcb-5b28-4b03-863e-89308bc8c502 | Datastore:datastore-11:481639ff-d88d-4622-8872-ec6856e6b157  | Datastore

VCDB=# select * from cl_library_storage;
              library_id              |              storage_id
--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
 3336e2ad-8166-4e6a-850d-a9d81c41ba01 | a0018db8-f630-4c04-b0f1-30c900ad691c
 946cea65-5cd0-41e0-83ab-17259f690ce1 | bf8e8dcb-5b28-4b03-863e-89308bc8c501
 946cea65-5cd0-41e0-83ab-17259f690ce1 | bf8e8dcb-5b28-4b03-863e-89308bc8c502

after adding the above records, I am now able to deploy VM’s from the content library across Datacenters.

content library DB schema can be found here:

/usr/lib/vmware-content-library/support/scripts/db/PostgreSQL/cls_unified/cls60.sql