vSphere Plugin & Hot Spares

[Rob Oxspring]

Hi

I've recently started playing with the "Cloud" part of the vSphere Cloud Plugin to avoid manually managing slaves.  Generally it's great but when building a job in a hurry it can be painful to wait for several minutes for a new slave to be cloned, especially when the job itself is only a minute or two long! I'd really like to be able to have N slaves already cloned and waiting for jobs when they're ready as hot spares - either specifying a fixed minimum number of slaves to run, or ideally a target number of hot spares that should be spun up and waiting at any given time (within the instance cap limit).

Is there any way to achieve something like this that I haven't spotted?

Thanks,

Rob