- I know cloud director/vsphhere/vcenter should not all be on one host, but this is for our software QA test lab and is not some mission critical situation. The machine is a Dell R710 with 128 RAM. Would this probably be ok for our application?
- What is the min I need to buy? Do I need the Cloud Suite Enterprise to do get the self-service portal and fast provisioning or is there a less expensive verison?
It would be best to talk to a sales representative about this. If you purchase the 'vcloud suite' of any teir, it will let you install and use vCloud Director. I believe that all versions will give you Fast Provisioning and the Portal (vCloud Director itself).
You will still need a Red Hat OS license to install vCloud Director for a supported deployment, or CentOS for an unsupported deploymnet. The vCloud Appliance would also work, but it's only for Proof of Concept (last I heard).
If you don't use the appliance, you also need a supported Oracle or MS SQL DB Server to host the vCloud Database. SQL Express from vCenter won't work (by default) as it only supports local connections and has other limitations (total DB size)
The difference in versions will affect what you get with it ... again talk to sales about exactly what you would need. But I think standard should suit you.
- Can I script the creation of fast provisioned VMs?
You just enable Fast Provisioning on the Organization vDC, assuming it is supported. Once this is done, any operation that should make a linked clone will make a linked clone.
- How do I search sub-forums here?
Go to the forum you want to search, and use the search box. Don't hit enter or anything. You should get some quick results with options, and there is a link to "search only <insert forum name here>". Then view all results.