Provisioning is the process of creating an instance or virtual machine from an image or template. Usually, provisioning of instances in a cloud environment (or virtual machines in a virtualized environment) involves logging in to the provider-specific management console or command-line tools. As discussed earlier, this is a challenge if you have different cloud/virtual providers, but CloudForms helps us overcome this through a unified management portal where we are able to provision instances or virtual machines from a central location.

Provisioning is also a life cycle management step, and hence the option is available under the Lifecycle button.

We provision an instance in a cloud provider or a virtual machine in an infrastructure provider, and the process involves three stages. They are:

The information required in each of these steps varies depending on whether we are deploying an instance or a virtual machine. We will visit these steps in...