General datacenter practice is to have standardized IT approved OS images that will be used for deployment, as opposed to building and installing a guest OS from scratch at every instance. This is addressed by using either virtual machine templates that are native to vSphere or leveraging open virtual machine standard OVF/OVA.
Converting a virtual machine to a template
How to do it...
In the following recipe, we shall discuss converting/cloning a virtual machine to a template/OVF for reuse:
- Right-click on a VM and navigate to Template | Convert to Template:
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781787127418/graphics/assets/dc968775-cde7-4c77-9fcc-44d51332eed6.png)
- Confirm from the Recent Tasks pane that the task is completed as shown in the screenshot:
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781787127418/graphics/assets/e92209e6-3d52-47ef-9560-15af7b33cbb3.png)