Virtual Machine Lifecycle

You create and deploy virtual machines into your data center in several ways. You can create a single virtual machine and install a guest operating system and VMware Tools on it. You can clone or create a template from an existing virtual machine, or deploy OVF templates.

In the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client, you can use the New Virtual Machine wizards and the Virtual Machine Properties editors to add, configure, or remove most of the virtual machine's hardware, options, and resources. You monitor CPU, memory, disk, network, and storage metrics using the performance charts in the vSphere Client. Snapshots let you capture the state of the virtual machine, including the virtual machine memory, settings, and virtual disks. You can roll back to the previous virtual machine state when needed.

With vSphere vApps, you can manage multitiered applications. You use vSphere Update Manager to perform orchestrated upgrades to upgrade the virtual hardware and VMware Tools of virtual machines in the inventory at the same time.

When a virtual machine is no longer needed, you can remove it from the inventory without deleting it from the datastore. But you can also choose to delete the virtual machine and all its files.