This is a quick and dirty spreadsheet that concatenates together the commands to quickly deploy a bunch of VMs without clicking the GUI. All it takes Powershell, PowerCli and optionally PowerGUI. This is a method that will pound out dozens if not hundreds of clones, but it will not do anything fancy beyond cloning a VM, applying a customization specification and bring a bunch of servers up. You still need to IP the server, join to domain, etc.
This is an ideal solution when your boss gives you a spreadsheet with a ton of server names that needs to be deployed a week ago.
There are much more elegant ways to this, especially if you take the time to learn Orchestrator. I highly recommend Cody Bunch’s book Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator if you want to learn this free product that comes with vCenter.
Use with caution! Make sure you vary Hosts and Datastores!
vHipsterVMDeploymentScriptBuilder
N.B. You have to start entering values to make code appear.
