Creating a vESXi template
Jan 6, 2012 Blogs
A lot of my day-to-day work involves building and tearing down various configurations containing ESXi-hosts. For this, I use my laptop; a Dell Precision M4600. This means that the ESXi-hosts are virtual machines. I use vESXi templates and linked clones inside VMware Workstation to speed things up and save on disk space, instead of rebuilding each host anew.
I use the concept of templates and linked clones for my Windows virtual machines as well. With Windows, we get the advantage of sysprep to generalize the Guest OS, but with ESXi, such a tool doesn’t exist. We need some workarounds to make sure the Guest OS installation is generalized so each linked clone has its own unique identity.
