This process could become very tedious if you had many Xen-based VMs. A rudimentary discovery process in the application would grease this application mightily. DynamicOps representatives said the Infrastructure Organizer should be able to handle XenServer and Hyper-V environments in the next major release (3.2) of VRM.

Creating virtual machines from scratch from within the VRM infrastructure is not possible. It's only possible to copy an existing blueprint, which are forms we filled in with various desired settings after which we could provision VMs. The requested VMs were created in the same storage location that was set in the reservation.

We had some virtual machines on local storage and some on shared storage. When the blueprints were used to create a new VM, that VM was created in the same location (either local or shared folders). We were able to set parameters within the blueprint regarding whether the VM needed to permission to clone itself. And depending on the user group that we had defined, our user role allowed us to get specific blueprints, where we were allowed to get them. Then a group leader (or VRM administrator) had to approve our request to provision a new VM. The approval process is a good security measure that we did not see in other products.

The blueprint process gives fine control for replicating VM templates, but is a tedious process. You can create blueprints for all kinds of VMs on all hypervisor platforms. But creating blueprints requires carefully going through the documentation to make sure each setting was correct for the desired VM on the desired platform. Generally the data entered in our test was similar but some fields were required for VMware that weren't required for others. So when we wanted to create a blueprint for Windows 2008 Server, we needed to create three blueprints -- one for each environment.

Setting up the blueprint to clone a VM was pretty difficult because the documentation was not clear and every setting had to be entered manually. VMware VirtualCenter has specific clone-time attributes needed to be set within the blueprint. For example, the setting "VMware.VirtualCenter.OperatingSystem" was the one that gave us the most trouble. If DynamicOps had this information in the docs or a link to a list of values that go here, the process would been simpler.