Cloning virtual machines

Clone a Virtual Machine is the mechanism that allows to use an existing virtual machine to create a copy of itself.

The cloning process copies all existing disks (And the data in them), such as CPU and memory configurations of a virtual machine to another.
This task may take considerable time depending on the size of the disks to copy.
Two virtual machines can not have the same IP addresses, because of this, upon completion of the cloning process, you must assign IP addresses to the new virtual machine.

Uses of cloning

The cloning process can be useful in the following scenarios:

Perform a total backup of a virtual machine.
For this task you can also consider making a Snapshot.
If you have already configured software on a virtual machine, you can use as a template to create new virtual machines through cloning, thus avoiding having to configure the software again on each new virtual server.
Create a test environment without affecting existing production system.

Clone a virtual machine

After the cloning, you must configure at least one new network card in the new virtual machine.
It is then necessary to assign new IP addresses to the cloned machine.

Name of the cloned virtual machine.
Number of CPUs of the cloned virtual machine, you can modify it.
Amount of RAM of the cloned machine, you can modify it.
Primary DNS from the original machine, you can modify
Secondary DNS from the original machine, you can modify
Add virtual hard disks.
Increase disk size. It is currently not possible decrease the size of an existing disk.
Delete existing disk: If you delete a disk all data within it they will be deleted. This task is irreversible.
Add network cards. Cloned virtual machine does not have any network card, you need to add at least one.

Click on the Save Changes button. The new virtual machine will be available.