We have a number of hosts running VMWare ESXi 5.5 all attached to a vCenter instance. We access and manage all of our VMs with the vSphere Web Client.
A number of people who do not necessarily have a lot of VMWare experience create VMs on a cluster of these hosts. Due to storage limitations we prefer that they set their hard disks to Thin Provision when creating new VMs.
However, this setting is hidden well in the UI and many people end up forgetting it.
My question is, does VMWare provide any way to set some kind of default VM configuration? Perhaps with settings on vCenter, vSphere Web Client, or even each individual host? Like I said we are mostly concerned with defaulting to Thin Provisioning for new hard disks.
Thanks!
Best Answer
You could create a VM template for those users and have them deploy from template. In addition you could check to see whether linked clones are an option for your deployment needs. As a sidenote; You may want to reconsider whether those who cannot properly operate vCenter should have access to it.