Managing Depot Overrides

In case you have a smaller Remote Office/ Branch Office (ROBO) cluster environment, or Edge computing environment, your clusters have no, or limited access to the Internet and limited connection to a vCenter Server instance. In such an environment, you can use the Depot Manager to fetch the metadata and payloads of a desired software state from a local to the cluster depot.

To remediate a ROBO cluster, you must have access to a local software depot that hosts the components of the desired state. You can use the Depot Manager to either export the whole vSphere Lifecycle Manager depot to an offline bundle, or export only the content of the desired state required for remediating the ROBO cluster.

To export the desired state image from the vSphere Lifecycle Manager depot, call the export(cluster,export_spec) method of the com.vmware.esx.settings.clusters.Software interface. This method returns the URI of the offline bundle that is hosted on the vSphere Lifecycle Manager Jetty Web server. To move the content of the offline bundle to the ROBO location, you must physically copy the ZIP file, unarchive, and mount its content to an HTTP server inside the ROBO environment.

The vSphere Automation APIs offer the com.vmware.esx.settings.clusters.DepotOverrides interface to redirect a ROBO cluster to download software updates from a local repository and not from the vSphere Lifecycle Manager depot on the vCenter Server instance. To add a depot override location to a ROBO cluster, call the add(cluster,override_depot) method of the DepotOverrides interface. Specify the URI location of the local depot with the setLocation(location) method of the com.vmware.esx.settings.clusters.DepotOverridesTypes.Depot class. During the ROBO cluster remediation, the Depot Manager instructs the hosts in the ROBO cluster to download the software updates from the configured local depots within the ROBO cluster.