I should be clear that although libraries do have a physical manifestation by storing
content on the file shares that you specify when you add new library servers, not
everything in the library is saved as a file. You will not find virtual machine templates
or profiles as files on the filesystem; instead, templates and profiles are stored as
Metadata in the SCVMM SQL database.
The filesystem that corresponds to a location in the library can be accessed by right-
clicking a library branch and selecting Explore or by selecting Explore from the ribbon.
To add content not related to virtual machines,, such as drivers and ISO files, you use
the Explore feature and then copy content onto the filesystem via Windows Explorer.
When the library content is refreshed, the new content is displayed; you can force this
to occur by selecting the library server and then selecting the Refresh action on the
Library Server ribbon tab. By default, library content is automatically refreshed once
an hour, but you can change this in the Settings workspace and in the General
navigation area by selecting Library Settings and changing the refresh interval per
your organization’s requirements.
I previously covered the creation of templates, so I’m going to move on to using other
types of resources. Templates are one of the primary reasons to use SCVMM.
Although a single SCVMM library server is added during the installation of SCVMM,
additional library servers can be added. It’s common to add multiple library servers,
particularly so that you have a library server in each datacenter that has virtualization
hosts; this ensures that content that may need to be accessed by the hosts is locally
available and prevents you from having to traverse a WAN connection. When you add
a library server when the share is selected, select the Add Default Resources check box
for all of the SCVMM default library content to be copied to the share. SCVMM fully
supports hosting the file share that stores the library content on a highly available file
server, which means that it’s part of a failover cluster and helps ensure that the
content is available even if a node fails.
To ensure that hosts use a library server that is closest to them, you can assign library
servers to host groups by selecting the properties of the library server and setting up
the host group, as shown in Figure 9.5. The recommendation is that virtualization
hosts should be connected by at least a 100Mbps link to the library server they use,
but ideally 1Gbps.