Here are some of my notes from our POC of RCU 2.0.1

• While you make a golden datastore that holds your templates, the filer does an NDMP copy of the .vmdk files to a temporary directory on the destination datastore. It doesn't flexclone off of the original gold image.

• If the template doesn't reside on the same filer, if will do a copy of the remote vmdk over IP using vCenter. NDMP is much faster, so it seems best to keep all the datastores attached the same filer IP address

• Linux guest VMs don't seem to like LVM again. We've patched to the most up to date version of ESX, and all the guests have the most recent tools, but it's not working at the moment. The same template does do guest customization correctly using a standard deploy from template in vCenter. So for now I will remake the template SLES 10 guest without LVM and try again.

• Make sure your template vmdks have aligned partitions or RCU will complain. You can grab mbralign here for NetApp customers: http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/tools/mbralign/

• Each time you do a rapid clone, RCU copies the vmdk from the golden datastore, regardless of if the template data already exists on the destination datastore or not. This causes another full sized copy to be made to the destination datastore, so be sure to keep sis enabled and scheduled on the destination datastore (RCU turns on SIS when it creates a datastore, assuming you're licensed for it).

• It may be better to keep a cloned guest as a "datastore local" template if you know it's the most recent copy of the template. It is considerably faster to deploy this way, but you have to keep track of which datastores have the most recent template, which I could see might be cumbersome.

I'm looking forward to see what the plugin provides in vSphere! Hopefully it includes this functionality.