I want a template replicator vApp

I want a template replicator vApp…

Here’s the problem:

Companies that have more than one office split by a WAN link, have problems keeping their templates in sync.  There are two common approaches to this:
1) When updating a template, touch each site and update the same template in each location.
2) Update a master template and copy it out to each site.
Neither of these solutions scale very well, when you have multiple templates and lots of remote sites.

I dream of a vApp which you can deploy each site, and that is aware of the other instances at each site.  The vApp’s sole purpose is to watch for changes in a local template store on the designated “master” appliance, and replicate out those changes to all connected instances (at each sites).  It would be nice if those changes were just block-level changes.  The templates can sit in the vApp themselves on an NFS export, to be mounted by local ESXi hosts, so the templates can be deployed and updated straight from the vApp.

What do you think?  Obviously these tasks can be offloaded to storage array replication, DataDomain type devices, etc.  But I’d like a native tool that could be used anywhere, and wouldn’t rely on specific equipment.  Let me know in the comments below if you already have any groovy tools or rsync scripts that you use to do this automagically.

Hopefully, the VMware labs can create me a new fling for Christmas 🙂