The Art of VM Templates-thin provisioning-guest partition alignment:

I found as excellent blog discussing this often overlooked art that I suspect many Vmware Admins might miss out on. Guest parition aligment, thin provisioning your templates so they deploy faster...are all big wins in a virtual environment.

For Linux templates

For Windows templates

The parition alignment tips can also be used for the physical world...just run fisk -l to get the proper /dev/XXXX name first.

Some final notes on the thin provisioning:
to convert vmdk file: vmkfstools -i test3.vmdk tes3thin.vmdk -d thin -a lsilogic
to create vmdk file: Vmkfstools –c 10G –a lsilogic -d thin test2.vmdk

IMPORTANT: You will not see the disk space savings with the ls command. Instead after doing this use the du command to see the savings.

In our case a 10gb template converted to thin format went down to little over 3gb...and instead of 10 minutes to deploy only took 3 minutes!