Converting a virtual machine to a template
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.
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:
- Confirm from the
Recent Taskspane that the task is completed as shown in the screenshot:
How it works...
The Convert to Template option simply marks a virtual machine as a template. The underlying file extension of a virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) changes to a virtual machine template file (.vmtx). This ensures that typical virtual machine-specific tasks such as power-on or reset can no longer be executed against the template.
