Hi,
the consolidation could be done with vCenter Orchestrator, which itself could be triggered by a blocking task from vCloud Director. Or it could be triggered by some other system. But is not as comfortable as the self-service-portal provided by vCloud Director. And don't forget the fact that the vm has to be shut down.
We as a service provider currently do not use fast provisioning. Why ?
- Since all of our customer have different requirements regarding the hard disk size, we would into the extending problem all the time. Or we would have to offer lots of different "templates"
- We provide Infrastructure as a service. We don't know what applications the customer installs and runs. And because of that, the vm pretty soon will be very different from the original vm.
- And since we don't know what the customer does, we leave the "parent" vm untouched. I don't like the thought, that someday i'll have to explain why some customers super-critical sql-server does not working any longer, because something is broken in the parent vm. Better safe than sorry...
- Cloning a Windows Server 2008 R2 without fast-provisioning takes a maximum of 5 minutes within our infrastructure. I think that is not too long
Of course it is pretty impressive to create new vapps/vms in a matter of seconds, but we only use that during presales/demos ;-)
We use that fast-provisioning/linked clone stuff in our View VDI environment, but only for stateless desktops.
Call me "old-school", but we just handle it that way