Here are 2 great articles of best practices for creating templates for virtual machines. I’m referring them here as my own bookmarks:

VM Template best practices (Windows)

VM Template best practices (Linux)

One thing I learned is that you already can create thin provisioned disks in VMware ESX 3.5:

vmkfstools -c 20G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/datastore/virtualmachine_name/virtualmachine_disk1.vmdk

Big thanks to lraikhman

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