Cloning is the process of creating a copy of existing virtual machines. It saves time in installing operating systems and doing initial configuration; however, this may be dangerous. There are post-cloning tasks that have to be performed, and they are discussed in the next section.
To clone a virtual machine, right-click on a VM in the inventory and choose the Clone... option from the menu:
Follow the wizard prompts that will ask you to choose the name and location for the new virtual machine.
Cloning can be done while a VM is running or while it's off. There are two options, which are referred to as hot and cold cloning.
When you do hot cloning, vCenter creates a snapshot and then makes a copy of the snapshot that will become the new virtual machine. Therefore, if any data has been changed during cloning, the new virtual machine will be out-of-date as these changes have not been committed.
Cold cloning takes less time and less space as it doesn't require...