Create a Distributed Catalog in the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal

You can create distributed catalogs which are identical on all shared VMware Cloud Director instances because the instances have shared storage. The changes to a distributed catalog can be bidirectional.

A distributed catalog in VMware Cloud Director is a catalog that users in multiple VMware Cloud Director instances can access and update simultaneously. All users in all VMware Cloud Director instances that have access to the distributed catalog can see the changes, additions, and removals that users in other VMware Cloud Director instances make to the catalog. There are no other differences between a distributed and non-distributed catalogs apart from the distribution of its contents. You can share, publish, and subscribe to a distributed catalog between organizations and between VMware Cloud Director instances the same way as a regular local catalog.

All VMware Cloud Director instances see the same catalog state and content and receive the same updates from the shared distributed storage. The time it takes for the changes to appear on all instances depends on the distributed storage.

Note: You cannot create distributed catalogs in a VDC that has fast provisioning enabled.

Prerequisites

• Verify that you are logged in as a Catalog Author or a role with an equivalent set of rights.

• Verify with your system administrator that they set up the necessary configurations for distributed catalogs. See Configure Distributed Catalogs for an Organization.

Procedure

1. From the primary left navigation panel, select Content Hub and from the secondary navigation panel, select Catalogs.
   The list of catalogs appears in a grid view.
2. Click New to create a new catalog.
3. Enter the name and, optionally, a description of the catalog.
4. Turn on the Create on a specific storage policy? toggle.
5. Turn on the Create a distributed catalog? toggle.
6. Select the organization VDC that you want to use to host the distributed catalog.
7. Select a distributed storage policy to store the content of this catalog.
   When creating a distributed catalog, you can select only distributed storage policies.
8. Choose between binding the new catalog to an existing distributed catalog or creating a new distributed catalog.

   Option	Description
   Bind to an existing distributed catalog	Turn on the Bind to an existing distributed catalog? toggle. Select the distributed catalog to which you want to bind the new catalog. The list shows the existing distributed catalogs that VMware Cloud Director detects for the selected distributed storage policy.
   Create a new distributed catalog	Turn off the Bind to an existing distributed catalog? toggle. Enter a name for the distributed catalog. Select the default access level for this catalog. This setting determines what level of access have the other sites connecting to this catalog.

9. Click OK.

Results

The new catalog appears in the grid view on the Catalogs tab. In the list of catalogs, the Distributed column shows which catalogs are distributed.

What to do next

• When you bind a catalog to a distributed catalog, you can see the corresponding entries that are bound to the distributed catalog.
  1. Click the name of the distributed catalog.
  2. From the page-level left navigation panel, select Peers.

     The list provides information about the distribution catalogs to which your catalog is bound.

  3. To view more details about the corresponding sites and distributed catalogs, click Manage Columns and add additional columns to the page view.
• If you are logged in as a system administrator or a provider role with the Catalog: Manage Distribution Settings and Catalog: View Distribution Settings rights, to manually refresh the catalog state from the underlying distributed storage, click Refresh Distributed Catalog.

Edit a Distributed Catalog in the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal

You can edit all the settings of a distributed catalog.

Prerequisites

• Verify that you are logged in as a system administrator or a provider role with the Catalog: Manage Distribution Settings and Catalog: View Distribution Settings rights.
• Create a Distributed Catalog in the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal

Procedure

1. From the primary left navigation panel, select Content Hub and from the secondary navigation panel, select Catalogs.
   The list of catalogs appears in a grid view.
2. Click the name of a distributed catalog.
   A distributed catalog must have a check mark under Distributed column and status Healthy under Distribution Health column. If any of the distributed datastores does not send a heartbeat for more than a set amount of time. You can configure the period by using config scan-distributed-datastore-heartbeat.timeout.seconds.
3. Click Edit.
4. Edit the distributed catalog.

   Option	Description
   Name	Name of the catalog, visible only in your deployment. The name must be unique at the organization level.
   Description	Optional description of the catalog.
   Distributed Catalog Name	Name of the distributed catalog, visible to other sites between which the catalog is distributed.
   Distributed Delete Action	Depending on your selection, catalog deletion can cause different actions. Delete - Deleting the catalog deletes the content in the distributed datastore Detach - Deleting the catalog keeps the content in the distributed datastore and deletes only the local database copy.
   Distributed Access Level	The level of access that other organizations have to this distributed catalog.