I was surprised this morning to find that you can’t directly move templates using the existing cmdlets.  Looks like you can either a) change template to a VM using set-template or b) use Get-View on a Folder object and then call its MoveIntoFolder_Task method.

Method A – there and back again

   1: $vm = Get-Template wind* | Set-Template -ToVM |

   2:     Move-VM -Destination (Get-Folder templates)

   3: $vmView = $vm | Get-View

   4: $vmView.MarkAsTemplate()

TotalSeconds      : 8.9222029

Method B – do it folder style

This one should be much faster…let’s see:

   1: $TmplView = Get-Template wind* | Get-View

   2: $FolderView = Get-Folder Templates | Get-View

   3: $FolderView.MoveIntoFolder( $TmplView.MoRef )

TotalSeconds      : 2.0466224

We have a winner

Note that I didn’t actually use MoveIntoFolder_Task(), I used just MoveIntoFolder().  The former will create a task and queue the operation, returning control to your script immediately. That’s good for some things but not for the purposes of measuring the timing. 

Also note that the timing was performed on my home lab.  I imagine on nice hardware method B would take less than a second.