Before you start uploading files to

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

, you must create a bucket. You can then upload any number of files to the bucket. A bucket is a logical unit of storage. Buckets are the fundamental containers in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

.

You can access and manage buckets from the

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

user interface. See Working with buckets. Alternatively, you can use the S3 API that

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

supports. See Working with VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension S3 API.

To organize and categorize your buckets, you can add multiple key-value pairs of tags to your buckets. For example, you can create a bucket to store financial reports from the financial department in your organization. You can tag this bucket with the following key-value pairs:

Key	Value
Department	Finance
Report	Monthly

Bucket names are globally unique and the namespace is shared between all

VMware Cloud Director

organizations. After you create a bucket, the name of that bucket cannot be used for another bucket in any of the

VMware Cloud Director

organizations until the bucket is deleted. Bucket names must adhere to the S3 bucket naming requirements. See Amazon S3 Bucket Naming Requirements.

Objects in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

are the files that you upload to your buckets.

You can categorize objects within a bucket by adding key-value pairs of tags. If you are the owner of an object and have

Read

and

Write

permissions on the bucket that stores the object, you can add properties to the objects. You add the properties to the object by defining metadata in the form of a key-value pair.

Organization administrators can access and manage the objects that all users within their organization own. Organization users can access and manage the objects that they own and the objects that are shared with them.

You can preview image, text, PDF, audio, and video files directly in the user interface of

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

.

A vApp is a package/container of multiple interoperating virtual machines that communicate over a network and use resources and services in your environment. The virtual machines in the vApp are managed as a unit and distributed in OVA and OVF format. With

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

, you can store the vApps that you do not use in your

VMware Cloud Director

environment. When you capture a vApp from

VMware Cloud Director

and move it to

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

, you copy the vApp data from the

VMware Cloud Director

datastore to the back-end storage appliance that

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

uses. By capturing a vApp from

VMware Cloud Director

, you do not copy the storage reservation to

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

.

Later, if you need any of the vApps that you captured and store in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

, you can restore the vApps back to their original location. You can also download vApps as OVA files for backup and archiving purposes.

Catalogs in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

are similar to the catalogs in

VMware Cloud Director

and act as containers for vApp and virtual machine templates.

You can upload ISO, OVA, OVF, and VMDK files to the

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

catalogs.

Catalogs in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

can be used as external catalogs for

VMware Cloud Director

. An

organization administrator

can subscribe a

VMware Cloud Director

organization to a catalog in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

. The subscription makes all files that are stored in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

available to the

VMware Cloud Director

organization users without consuming any of the compute resources in the

VMware Cloud Director

environment. For information about subscribing your

VMware Cloud Director

organization to an external catalog, see

Subscribe to an External Catalog

in the

VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal Guide

.

When you create a catalog in

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

, a bucket is also created and is reserved as a system bucket. You cannot manage that bucket the way you manage buckets created by users.

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

supports S3-compatible API and the AWS Signature V4 authentication. Security credentials are used for authenticating S3 API requests and consist of an access key and a secret key.

VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension

supports user and application types of security credentials.

With S3 API requests authenticated with user credentials, you can access and manage buckets and objects that you own or that are shared with you.

With S3 API requests authenticated with application credentials, you can access and manage objects at the bucket level.