Creating Templates and Deploying Virtual Machines
In a vSphere environment, what would traditionally take several hours to do is now reduced to a matter of minutes. In this chapter, you've already seen how you can quickly and easily spin up new VMs with VM cloning and customization specifications, complete with the guest OS already installed. The templates feature of vCenter Server builds on this functionality to help you roll out new VMs quickly and easily with limited administrative effort while protecting the master VMs from inadvertent changes.
Although VM templates have been around for a number of releases, vSphere 6.0 introduced a new concept, Content Libraries. Similar to some functionality found in VMware vCloud Director, these libraries store and organize not just VM templates, but also ISO images, floppy disk images, and scripts. First, we'll walk you through using templates, and then later in the chapter, we'll explain how to use Content Libraries.
