1. An apparatus, comprising: at least one processor; and program code configured upon execution by the at least one processor deploy a virtual machine in a virtualized computing environment, the program code configured to: access a composite virtual machine template from a virtual machine template data store to retrieve a plurality of deployment attributes for use in deploying a virtual machine, wherein the composite virtual machine template includes first and second respective references to first and second virtual machine templates, the first virtual machine template defining a first set of deployment attributes and the second virtual machine template defining a second set of deployment attributes, wherein the plurality of attributes includes the first and second sets of deployment attributes, and wherein retrieving the plurality of deployment attributes includes accessing the first and second virtual machine templates using the first and second references to retrieve the first and second sets of deployment attributes from the virtual machine template data store; and initiate a deployment of a virtual machine in the virtualized computing environment according to the plurality of deployment attributes; wherein the composite, first and second virtual machine templates each include a plurality of data elements, wherein the plurality of data elements for each of the composite, first and second virtual machine templates includes a template identifier element storing an identifier for the respective composite, first and second virtual machine template, wherein the plurality of data elements for the first virtual machine template includes a template attribute element storing the first set of deployment attributes, wherein the plurality of data elements for the second virtual machine template includes a template attribute element storing the second set of deployment attributes, wherein the first reference includes the identifier for the first virtual machine template, wherein the second reference includes the identifier for the second virtual machine template, and wherein the plurality of data elements for the composite virtual machine template includes a template reference element, the template reference element storing a set of template references including the first and second references.