Working with Virtual Machine Templates

Templates are virtual machines that cannot be run but can be used as a patterns to create new virtual machines. Virtual machine templates are not different from regular virtual machines except, as was mentioned earlier, that they cannot be run. In fact, you can convert a template to a regular virtual machine at any time, just as you can convert a regular virtual machine to a template.

The Parallels C API allows to perform the following template-related operations:

• Obtaining a list of the available virtual machine templates.
• Creating a virtual machine template from scratch.
• Converting a regular virtual machine to a template.
• Converting a template to a regular virtual machine.
• Creating a new virtual machine from a template.

The following subsections describes each operation in detail and provide code examples.