5.5

Create a Catalog For External Publication
An organization administrator in an organization that has permission to publish externally can create a
catalog whose contents, catalog items created locally, are made available to external consumers on a
subscription basis.
Organizations that are permitted to publish externally can enable any of their catalogs for external
publication. A catalog that is enabled for external publication becomes accessible at a URL assigned by the
system, and can be protected by a password. A catalog in another instance of vCloud Director can subscribe
to an externally published catalog and maintain an up-to-date set of catalog items. See “Synchronization,”
on page 197.
You can use this procedure to create a new catalog that is enabled for external publication, or you can use
the procedure shown in “Publish an Existing Catalog Externally,” on page 211 to enable an existing catalog
for external publication. If a catalog has an external subscription, you cannot enable it for external
publication.
Prerequisites
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Verify that you are logged in as a system administrator, an organization administrator, or a user with
the Catalog Author role.
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Verify that at least one VDC exists in your organization. You cannot create a catalog in an organization
that has no VDCs.
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Verify that your organization has permission to publish externally.
The OrgGeneralSettings in the AdminOrg element that represents your organization must have a
CanPublishExternally element with a value of true.
<CanPublishExternally>true</CanPublishExternally>
Retrieve the XML representation of the organization to which to add the catalog, and examine the response
to locate the Link element that contains the URL for adding catalogs to the organization. See “Add a Catalog
to an Organization,” on page 198.
Procedure
1 Create an AdminCatalog element that includes PublishExternalCatalogParams.
See the request portion of “Example: Create a Catalog For External Publication,” on page 201.
2 POST the AdminCatalog element to the organization's add URL for catalogs.
See the request portion of “Example: Create a Catalog For External Publication,” on page 201.
The server creates an empty catalog and returns its representation in the response. See the response portion
of “Example: Create a Catalog,” on page 199.
Example: Create a Catalog For External Publication
This request is similar to the one used in “Example: Create a Catalog,” on page 199 but includes a
PublishExternalCatalogParams element that specifies that the catalog is to be published externally. This
request creates the catalog with a content cache, which can improve synchronization performance for
external catalogs that subscribe to this one, but requires enough space on the system's transfer storage to
accommodate all of the items in the catalog. This request also sets the PreserveIdentityInfoFlag element to
false, which prevents values such as the BIOS UUID and MAC address associated with virtual machine
identities from being published. If you omit this element or set its value to true, these values are published
for all catalog items that represent virtual machines.
Chapter 6 Creating and Managing Organizations
VMware, Inc. 201