Working with Registries
You use registries to store and distribute images. You can add multiple registries, in addition to the integrated vSphere Integrated Containers Registry to gain access to both public and private images. You can enable and disable the registries that you added. You can add global registries, that are visible to all projects, as well as project registries, that are available only to the project to which they are added. All users can only search and provision images and templates from registries that are available to their projects. When you disable a registry, searching for templates and images in that registry is also disabled.
Even if you disable the default https://registry.hub.docker.com registry, you can still see the popular templates under Library > All Repositories > Repositories.
To see all repositories configured in the vSphere Integrated Containers Registry, go to Library > All Repositories > Built-In Repositories.
Starting with vSphere Integrated Containers 1.4, you can configure namespaces for the registries that you add. If you add a new registry and configure a namespace for it, users cannot search, browse, or deploy images that are outside of that namespace. You can add a registry multiple times to allow users to reach different namespaces in that registry.
vSphere Integrated Containers supports JFrog Artifactory and can interact with both Docker Registry HTTP API V1 and V2 in the following manner:
| Protocol | Description |
|---|---|
| V1 over HTTP (unsecured, plain HTTP registry) | You can freely search this kind of registry, but you must manually configure each Docker host with the --insecure-registry flag to provision containers based on images from insecure registries. You must restart the Docker daemon after setting the property. You cannot use HTTP connections with vSphere Integrated Containers Registry instances. |
| V1 over HTTPS | Use behind a reverse proxy, such as NGINX. The standard implementation is available through open source at https://github.com/docker/docker-registry. |
| V2 over HTTPS | The standard implementation is open sourced at https://github.com/docker/distribution. |
| V2 over HTTPS with basic authentication | The standard implementation is open sourced at https://github.com/docker/distribution. |
| V2 over HTTPS with authentication through a central service | You can run a Docker registry in standalone mode, in which there are no authorization checks. |