I am spoiled from using ESX 3.5 with VCenter.
I setup a stand-alone machine to take a look at ESXi and see the same limitations of logging directly to an ESX host. Specifically not being able to create Templates to deploy each new VM. I was hoping to test a Desktop deployment to give the desktop guys a taste of VM and kill two birds with one rock.
How many of you are using it in its stand-alone capacity and are prepared to manually create each VM, is there a short-cut?
I am not looking forward to creating 15 - 20 machines.
That's correct. This has ALWAYS been a limitation of ESX. You can't deploy, you may be able to clone (but that may even be limited). That's just one of the many reasons why VC is in use.
without VC you are extremely limited to doing many things. ESX 3i also has no web access and you can't use RCLI (stand alone).
If this is going to be for a R/D box and you want to show all the bells and whistles of ESX and what it can do, you might as well do an "eval" of VirtualCenter which will give you 30 days to mess around with it, deploy the 15-20 machines and show your desktop guys what it can do.
Kyle
It's on my list to try this out with ESXi, but with standalone ESX, you can clone a VMDK using vmkfstools from the command line.
vmkfstools -i \
/vmfs/volumes/473b3617-d16b0504-3ec9-001cc47ceca2/Win2003R2-Ent-32/Win2003.vmdk\
/vmfs/volumes/473ccab1-db879908-4a5a-001cc47ceca2/WADTS02/WADTS02.vmdk
After the copy is done, get into the VI client and add a VM, choosing the "Use an existing virtual disk" option from the Wizard.
We just kept the "template" as a regular VM, not in a domain, with DHCP IP addresses. After the copy is complete, run sysprep, add it to the domain, and off you go.
The remote cli documentation shows the vmkfstools.pl script has the -i option, but I've not tested this yet.