A follow-on discussion on if VMware it too heavily focused on vSphere and if they are in effect a one hit Wonder.
VMware is more than vSphere but.. – TechTalk Episode 31
Technology, Virtualization and Cloud Computing
Technology, Virtualization and Cloud Computing
A follow-on discussion on if VMware it too heavily focused on vSphere and if they are in effect a one hit Wonder.
Virtualized Geek 
You said it took 10 minutes to deploy an instance ? My guess would be a large part of the problem might have been HDD-performance ? Have you considered enabling the write-cache/cache-writeback for the VM ? Which on a lot of hypervisors is an option.
Your data might be less safe, but who cares about that for a test setup if it saves you time. You can even make snapshots after you’ve done certain tasks.
I think it’s a combination of the fact that I limited the vCenter to only 3GB of RAM and the vCenter API’s for orchestration haven’t always been the most robust. I’m going to try it on my Workstation which has 32GB of RAM and 4 cores + Hyper threading. It should be a big difference.
I put it on a system with more RAM and it took less than a minute to provision and boot a new instance.