This recipe will guide you through the steps to rapidly provision a virtual machine using the Storage Area Network (SAN) Copy technology (for example, snapshots and cloning).
Using rapid provisioning, you can quickly create and deploy VMs, but if you want to use a template that is SAN Copy capable, the storage must support SAN Copy through cloning or snapshots.
The template that is SAN Copy capable allows VMM, when deploying a new VM, to create a read/write copy of the LUN containing the VHD/VHDX file, which then places the VM files on the new LUN assigned to a destination host/cluster. For this operation, a storage transfer is used instead of a network transfer.