Once the setup of the vSphere environment has been completed, the final step involved in firing up your virtual infrastructure is deploying the virtual machines. When the hosts and vCenter Server are in place, they provide physical resources to the VMs that physically reside on the storage device shared within the environment.

This chapter will look closely at the structure of VMs and their configuration to better understand how they work and which options we should configure in order to obtain the best performance. The use of templates is a key point in the management of VMs since it simplifies the management of the environment, allowing VMs to be created easily and deployed quickly. Compared to physical machines, VMs deployed from a template don't need to be installed from scratch, which saves you time.

We will also look at the content library, which allows us to centrally store all our ISO images and templates. We can easily replicate its content over the network to vCenter servers in different sites.

We will cover how to work with virtual machines and which operations can be performed on VMs, such as snapshots. We will also have a look at different physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual conversions.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The components of a virtual machine
• Deploying VMs
• The content library
• Managing VMs
• The content library and its features
• Importing and exporting VMs
• Converting VMs