If you are planning for VMware host maintenance, you may want to manually move your operating system templates to an alternate VMHost. Unfortunately there is no straight forward method of moving a template as you do a Virtual Machine. If you try to move a template to another host you will see an error message as “The operation is not supported on the object.”

There are three different ways to achieve this task those are discussed below.

Method 1 : Use Convert to Virtual Machine option to convert the template to a VM and then do a VMotion to change the host. (After this you will need to again convert this VM to a template)

Method 2 : Use Remove from Inventory option on the template to remove from the VMHost and then add it from Datastore.

 

Adding the same template back to inventory from the datastore.

 

 

Method 3 : Select Enter Maintenance Mode on the VMHost. It will automatically move all the Templates to another VMHost. (Move all the VMs first before enabling Maintenance Mode)