You can publish a catalog during the creation process, or you can select an existing catalog, right-click, and select Publish.

Within an enterprise organization, it is not uncommon for the IT team to create its own smaller organizations to build and update vApp templates. These templates are then shared with other business units through the global catalog and are aligned with corporate build standards to reduce variances and support increased security.

Service providers often allow individual organizations to manage their own catalogs where the service provider offers a compute resource as opposed to a service. Some service providers, seeking to differentiate themselves or offer additional services, might publish common ISO files or basic virtual machine configurations consistent with licensing implications. Service providers might also offer published catalogs that contain applications developed or configured by software vendors.

ISO images cannot be shared with different organizations in a published catalog. For an ISO image to be mapped to a virtual machine, the ISO image must be available in the same organization virtual datacenter as the virtual machine.