Working with Virtual Machine Templates

Using a standardized naming convention for templates, some inventory panel views do not offer the opportunity to sort by type. Create a standard prefix for templates to help you intuitively identify them by sorting by name. Also, include enough descriptive information in the template name to know what is contained in the template.

Instead of saving virtual machine templates in a completely separate inventory, VirtualCenter 2 stores templates into the main inventory with other virtual machines. However, templates are identified by a different icon and by the ability to prevent them from powering on.

As such, templates can now be:

• Viewed from the "Virtual Machines and Templates" or the "Hosts and Clusters" inventory views.

• Converted back and forth quickly between virtual machines that can be powered on and receive updates and templates that cannot be powered on, but can be used as the source images from which to deploy new virtual machines.

• Stored in monolithic (runnable) virtual disk format for quick template -t- virtual machine conversions or stored in sparse (non-runnable) virtual disk format to conserve storage space.

Because of this, it is not possible to programmatically identify virtual machine templates to prevent running tasks on them. If a user tries to execute a job on virtual machine template, the output will confirm that the operation is not supported.

Special Characters in Names

Any / (slash), \ (backslash), character used in this name element is escaped. Similarly, any % (percent) character used in this name element is escaped, unless it is used to start an escape sequence. A slash is escaped as %2F or %2f. A backslash is escaped as %5C or %5c, and a percent is escaped as %25.

So, if a folder, VM or host name contains any of these special characters, the end user will be expected to "escape" those characters according to the rules above.