What are the best practices for provisioning?
Best practices depend on whether you have a SAN deployed. For customers with SANs, the best practice is to store all templates in a single VMFS volume that is accessible by all ESX Servers. You can then deploy SAN-based templates rapidly to the target ESX Servers. VirtualCenter automatically uses a local disk copy for SAN templates instead of copying the bits over the network. To get templates onto the VMFS volumes, you would first have to load the templates onto the local repository of the Management Server, deploy those templates onto an ESX Server as a virtual machine, and then create a template from that virtual machine and choose to place it on the appropriate VMFS volume. For customers who do not have SANs, the best practice is to store the templates on the local or direct attached storage of the VirtualCenter Management Server. VirtualCenter does not support usage of a network share as the template repository. Every time a new virtual machine is provisioned from these templates,
