A: Yes. In System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2, templates are optionally imported from vCenter into SCVMM, including the VMware virtual hard disk files (VMDKs). When the templates are imported into SCVMM, they’re unregistered from vCenter, which means the template has to be deployed using SCVMM.
When a template is deployed from SCVMM 2008 R2 to ESX, the VMDK has to be copied over the network every time by using SFTP, which can be slow compared to a native vCenter template deployment.
In SCVMM 2012, templates can still be imported from vCenter; however, only the metadata is imported. This gives SCVMM 2012 enough information to show the details of the template but doesn’t copy over template assets such as the VMDK files, and it means the template isn’t removed from vCenter.
When a template is deployed from SCVMM 2012 to ESX, SCVMM 2012 communicates with vCenter using APIs. It tells vCenter to deploy the template while maintaining fast performance and allowing the template to still be directly deployed from vCenter in addition to SCVMM 2012.
In the screen shot below, you see an ESX template imported into SCVMM 2012, but only the metadata was imported and you can see the storage for the VMDK file is the data store, which is based in the vCenter environment.
scvmm2012esxtemplate-Copy
This is a common theme with SCVMM 2012 ESX management. SCVMM 2012 sits side-by-side with vCenter now, rather than trying to replace it, offering SCVMM 2012’s great management capabilities for ESX virtual machines while allowing vCenter to still be used when desired.
Got technology issues? We've got technology answers. Check out John Savill's FAQs for Windows.
