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aidneosi
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How to make templates available on all hosts in a datacenter?

Hello and good morning everyone,

I'm fairly new to using VMWare (and VMs in general) but have been learning quickly and am starting to get the hang of things.

Yesterday, I created some templates for Windows and CentOS so that our teams can quickly deploy a VM without needing to install the OS. And it worked great!.....at least on the IT host. However, I want these templates to be available to all 4 of our hosts, since each team only has access to their respective host.

Is there a way to have the template in each hosts' inventory? I can migrate deploy a VM from the template and then migrate that VM to each of the hosts, but this doesn't allow me to use the same name as the original template.

Thanks!

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TheBobkin
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Hello aidneosi

Welcome to Communities.

"However, I want these templates to be available to all 4 of our hosts, since each team only has access to their respective host."

Do they have their own local-only datastores or shared storage to all hosts?

"Is there a way to have the template in each hosts' inventory? I can migrate deploy a VM from the template and then migrate that VM to each of the hosts, but this doesn't allow me to use the same name as the original template."

There can only be a single registered instance of a VM or template assigned a name per vCenter inventory - this only makes sense as otherwise it would be difficult and confusing for administrators/users. Why don't you just clone the VMs to templates for each host and put them on storage available to each host? If they are all in the same vCenter inventory then name them for each host e.g. win2016-esx1, win2016-esx2 etc. then you users can clone new VMs from these templates.

Bob

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daphnissov
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You will need to create a shared datastore that can be mounted by all hosts in the inventory on which you will store your templates. The easiest way is to create an NFS-backed datastore and svMotion your vSphere templates there.

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TheBobkin
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Hello aidneosi

Welcome to Communities.

"However, I want these templates to be available to all 4 of our hosts, since each team only has access to their respective host."

Do they have their own local-only datastores or shared storage to all hosts?

"Is there a way to have the template in each hosts' inventory? I can migrate deploy a VM from the template and then migrate that VM to each of the hosts, but this doesn't allow me to use the same name as the original template."

There can only be a single registered instance of a VM or template assigned a name per vCenter inventory - this only makes sense as otherwise it would be difficult and confusing for administrators/users. Why don't you just clone the VMs to templates for each host and put them on storage available to each host? If they are all in the same vCenter inventory then name them for each host e.g. win2016-esx1, win2016-esx2 etc. then you users can clone new VMs from these templates.

Bob

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daphnissov
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Why don't you just clone the VMs to templates for each host and put them on storage available to each host? If they are all in the same vCenter inventory then name them for each host e.g. win2016-esx1, win2016-esx2 etc. then you users can clone new VMs from these templates.

I personally wouldn't recommend doing that unless you literally cannot scrape together any form of shared storage no matter how slight. Even a $200 NAS would give you the shared storage you needed to make one template available throughout the cluster. Otherwise, you're now managing and maintaining N x M number of templates where N is the number of hosts and M is the number of unique templates. That means patching, configuration, hardening, etc. is done on an individual (and very likely manual) basis, which is just asking for trouble (and a waste of space). But if this is what you want to go with, good luck Smiley Happy

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TheBobkin
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daphnissov, I totally agree that there are a multitude of better options that save space and time and improve consistency etc. and while repository on shared storage may appear the *best* option, this doesn't seem to be OPs goal here I get the impression that splitting things out for end-user/customers to manage their own copies of is the intention and thus why I suggested the above and not something else :smileygrin: .

Bob

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aidneosi
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Yes you've got it right. Most of our users will probably make a multitude of changes to each VM they deploy from the template, having the templates available just means they don't need to waste 10-20 minutes installing the OS (at least for the two most common OS's).

Also, we've only four hosts, so it's not as bad as it could be. If I were planning to make and manage templates for each of the OS's our users use, or if we had more hosts, I would most likely try to implement a shared storage solution.

Thanks everyone!

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