How would you decide which template to use? I am fairly against of the concept of having a template per host, this imho not scaleable and hard to maintain.

maybe if you could describe a bit more your usage scenario, we could come up with usable alternative.

Currently I'm having groups for each version of OS I use.

There is a group for RHEL, for Ubuntu, for Solaris and so on.

I only have 2 Hosts which needs a Ubuntu-Desktop-Installation (because these 2 are sunray servers), all other machines are default server machines.
I dont want to split those two hosts to an extra group, as it breaks my current name-scheme and I dont like groups without much content ;)

So I would suggest to add a "default"-template to a hostgroup, but allow the selection of different templates for the same OS when creating/provisioning a host.

This means if I have added a template like "Ubuntu Server" to my OS Version "Ubuntu 11.10" and also add a template "Ubuntu Desktop" to OS "Ubuntu 11.10", I can set a flag default flag for the Server-Template for example. In this case the new Ubuntu machine would be installed with server template, but I can also manually choose the desktop-template if I want.

Just because I only have 2 servers in this group then. It's like a special group for every host which doesn't fit exactly in one group... So if you have some special-configs you are going to have a lot of hostgroups each containing only one or two hosts.

Also if you want to force the people using hostgroups like you expect, then you should not allow hostgroups to have more then one template of each kind (PXE, provisioning, finish). Otherwise everybody will be confused why a certain template is used while another template (added later) isn't used at all.

imho, thats one of the reasons you can nest hostgroups...

Who requested this again?

See the linked BZ which Mahesh opened.