Content lifecycle management in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager provides a way for release managers and content developers to manage software-defined data center (SDDC) content, including capturing, testing, and release to various environments, and source control capabilities through GitLab integration. Content Developers are not allowed to set Release policy on end-points only Release Managers can set policies.

You can use content lifecycle management to dispense with the time-consuming and error-prone manual processes required to manage software-defined content. Supported content includes entities from
  • vRealize Automation 7.2 and later.
  • vRealize Orchestrator 7.x and later.
  • VMware vSphere 6.0 and later.
  • vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1+ and later.
  • Source Control servers:
    • GitLab: All latest versions
    • Bitbucket Server 5.12.1
    • Bitbucket Cloud: All latest versions
Content lifecycle management in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager is similar to content lifecycle management with the vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for DevOps, with the following differences.
  • Content lifecycle management is deployed as part of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager on a single appliance. It has a new user interface and is tightly integrated with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager core services.
  • Updated vRealize Code Stream Pipeline services.

If there are dependencies between captured content packages, you can use content management life cycle to link them together while still having independent version control for each content package. For example, if a vRealize Automation Composite Blueprint has a dependency on Property-Definition, there are two items in the content catalog, one for each content package. With independent version control for each content package, you can edit, capture, and release dependencies independently so that the content is never stale. vRealize Automation allows to define multiple named value sets within the Size and Image component profile types. You can add one or more of the value sets to machine components in a blueprint. We cannot deploy or release Automation-ComponentProfiles in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to a target end-point if the corresponding value set already exists on the end-point.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager content lifecycle management supports native integration with GitLab (both CE or EE), including capabilities such as auto merge and performing a code review. You can provide an access token against your GitLab user profile so that content that has been captured can be checked in, checked out, and released. With vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2, you now have the provision to toggle the usage of Content Lifecycle on your UI under the Features tab. To access the Content Lifecycle Management, navigate to Settings > Features. By default, when content lifecycle management is enabled in LCM UI, SSH service will be enabled and you cannot disable it.

Using public API available for update settings including SSH connection, you can disable the SSH, even if the Content Lifecycle Management is enabled in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager UI, but Content Lifecycle Management will stop functioning. So SSH connection should not be disabled using available Public API, if content management feature is enabled in LCM UI.