Cloning is one of the golden features of virtualization. It is a feature that once you have used it, you will never want to go back to manually deploying servers. It really eases the problems of deploying consistent and compliant virtual machines by allowing an administrator to create a good, compliant image and then make copies of it for all future deployments.

While you can clone regular virtual machines, and there might be times when you need to do this, most of the time you will be cloning new virtual machines from a template. In this recipe, you will take a prepared VM with its operating system installed and basic configuration set, and explore how to clone it and how to convert it to a template.

Surprisingly, there is no Clone-VM cmdlet. The clone functionality is actually rolled into the New-VM cmdlet, which makes sense because essentially, a cloned VM is a new VM.