Introduction to virtual appliance specifications

The virtual appliance specifications (VApp specs) feature enables administrators to save complex virtual appliance configurations and present them to users for simple, self-service deployment across their virtual datacenters. Specs are similar to blueprints because the platform uses them to define the configurations to recreate. Administrators select the locations where users can work with each spec, including datacenters and public cloud regions, such as AWS and Azure ARM.

With specs, you can save the configuration of virtual appliances including VMs, storage, networks, monitoring, Chef, firewalls, and load balancers. When users create a new virtual appliance based on a spec (also referred to as to "materialize" a spec), the platform will automatically use existing virtual resources or create new ones for this virtual appliance.

The limitations of specs are as follows:

• Specs do not store data from VM disks; they use template disks only
• Specs do not support external networks and NICs or unmanaged networks and NICs
  • In vCloud, specs have basic support for external networks
• Specs do not support scaling groups

Users should also be aware of differences in features between private and public cloud environments.