Extending VCD Media Catalog Storage with vSAN

VMware Cloud Director stores ISO catalog media in a directory structure on one or more datastores backing the storage policy assigned to the catalog. The directory structure looks like this:

<VCD Instance Name>/media/<org ID>/<org VDC ID>/media-<media ID>.<ISO|FLP>

In case the datastore is backed by vSAN the whole directory tree (starting with the VCD Instance Name root folder) exists within a single vSAN Namespace object that has maximum size 255 GB. This might not be enough if you consider that the same directory is shared across multiple Org VDCs and Orgs (your tenants could altogether upload just about 25 10GB ISO images).

As of vSAN 8.0U1 there is a supported way to extend the VM Namespace limit via PowerCLI. The details are in the vSAN Operations Guide (page 124).

I will show briefly how to perform the resizing.

You need to find the vSAN datastore UUID and the object UUID. Both can be seen in the vCenter UI.

vSAN datastore UUID is seen in the location in the Summary view of the datastore.

The VM Namespace object UUID backing the VCD catalog directory can be seen in the Files view.

With that information we can now resize the object. The following PowerCLI commands performed risizing from 255 GB to 512 GB.

$services = Get-view 'ServiceInstance'
$datastoreMgr = Get-view $services.Content.DatastoreNamespaceManager
$datacenter = get-datacenter
$datastoreMgr.QueryDirectoryInfo($datacenter.ExtensionData.MoRef,"/vmfs/volumes/vsan:6c46b8baef884c56-96c033ba12d72500/175e8566-fcf9-130d-7b77-043201572d40")

Capacity  Used
--------  ----
  261120 14737

$datastoreMgr.IncreaseDirectorySize($datacenter.ExtensionData.MoRef, "/vmfs/volumes/vsan:6c46b8baef884c56-96c033ba12d72500/175e8566-fcf9-130d-7b77-043201572d40", 512000)
$datastoreMgr.QueryDirectoryInfo($datacenter.ExtensionData.MoRef,"/vmfs/volumes/vsan:6c46b8baef884c56-96c033ba12d72500/175e8566-fcf9-130d-7b77-043201572d40")

Capacity  Used
--------  ----
  512000 14737

Note that ISOs cannot be mounted to a VM that is running on a host that does not have access to the ISO datastore. This might be an issue with vSAN if HCI Mesh is not used as in such case vSAN datastore can be accessed only by VMs on the same cluster. So this approach would not be recommended for Elastic Org VDCs spanning multiple clusters.