No one has an opinion on this?
My thought was to build a web-server with a lot of local storage or NAS.
export VMs (ovf packages) from vSphere 4.1 to this storage media and make them available for browsing/deployment from their URL.
Basically, maintain a library of ovf templates as a backup strategy.
backup
- create vm
- export ovf template
restore
-deploy ovf template from ovf-template-repository