To provision new virtual machines in a vSphere IaaS control plane environment, the DevOps engineers rely on VM templates and images. Your role is to make sure the DevOps engineers have access to these VM templates and images by using the Content Library service.
You can create a local content library and populate it with VM templates in OVF or OVA file format, or other types of files. For more information and a sample of how to create a local content library, see Creating a Local Content Library.
You can also create a subscription to download the content of a published local content library as described in the following topic: Subscribing to a Content Library.
Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update3, you can secure the content library. The Content Library service verifies the library signing certificate during the synchronization process. If the certificate verification fails, only the library metadata is synchronized and the library content is not downloaded. For more information how to apply a security policy when you update a local or subscribed content library, see Editing the Settings of a Content Library.
After you create the content library, you must populate it with content either from your local file system or from a Web server. You must use only the VM images available on the VMware Cloud Marketplace web site. For example, download or subscribe to VM Service Image for Ubuntu if you want to enable a DevOps engineer to deploy a VM using this image. For more information about the available ways to populate a content library with content, see Working with Library Items.
You must give the DevOps engineers access to the VM templates stored in the content libraries, so that they can use these templates to provision VMs through the VM Service functionality. To give access, you must associate one or more content libraries to the namespace where the VM Service is present. See Associating a Content Library with a Namespace and Virtual Machines in vSphere IaaS control plane.
