7.6 Catalogs
Catalogs are the primary deployment mechanism in vCloud Director, serving as centralized repository for vApp templates and ISO media. Users self-provision vApps from vApp templates located in internal catalogs or global shared catalogs.
The following are catalog design considerations:
• Catalogs can be shared, published and subscribed. These rights are controlled with organization granularity.
• Catalogs can be shared to all or a subset of organizations. Sharing with a subset of organizations can only be performed by the vCloud system administrator because this is the only role with access to the list of organizations.
• Catalog publishing can be used for staging identical global shared catalogs among provider VDCs (vSphere instances) or vCloud Director instances (availability zones and regions).
• The catalog publish-subscribe mechanism uses vCloud Director cells’ transfer share storage. Early catalog export keeps a pre-exported catalog copy on the transfer share of the source vCloud Director instance. This improves synchronization speed.
• The catalog synchronization schedule can be set (start/stop time and interval).
• Catalogs support versioning.
• A catalog can be deployed to a particular storage policy.