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I am looking for something like a VM hardware specification file in vCenter appliances. A template/file that can be used to deploy VM with the same hardware specifications.

nickage
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  • If it's inside your infrastructure you can use Templates. If it's for deploying to 3rd party people you should use OVF format (but i don't know the details on how to create it). – LatinSuD Aug 21 '14 at 14:47
  • I don't think I can use templates since they already have installed OS and software on it, which I don't need, I was trying to find something similar to flavors in Openstack – nickage Aug 21 '14 at 16:28
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    But you can create a template from an empty VM if you want. On the other hand one good thing about virtualization is skip having to install the OS. – LatinSuD Aug 21 '14 at 16:33
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    Right, but what if I need to spin up 20 VM with the same hardware specification, 5 of them need to be Windows VMs, 10 of them - CentOS, and 5 - Debian. – nickage Aug 21 '14 at 16:36
  • The OS doesn't matter if you just need identical hardware. Just make the template be Windows or Linux, then (re)install the desired OS on the guests. Or make one template per each OS, with the same hardware specs. Or use PowerCLI to script the VM Guest creation, and then you're on your own to deploy the OS after guest creation. – mfinni Aug 21 '14 at 17:05
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    Can you explain where the pain-points are? Why is this a problem? – ewwhite Aug 21 '14 at 19:45

2 Answers2

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You can use templates. You can install and configure a machine the way you would like it set up, and then convert it to a template. This keeps the same machine configuration for each machine deployed from this template. enter image description here

tombull89
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  • As I mentioned I am looking for "hardware template", the template that can be used with different OSes. By doing this I want to avoid the step with hardware configuration where I need to choose amount of vCPU, RAM, Storage I want to give to a new VM. – nickage Aug 21 '14 at 16:33
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    If you just want hardware, you're still installing an OS from within the guest. That's generally inefficient, or at least slower, even if your OS deployment is automated. – mfinni Aug 21 '14 at 17:07
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I don't think there's such a thing. But maybe you can use vCO to automate away some things.

Mario Lenz
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