It is well into 2014 now, and VMware Fusion still has no way to Clone a VM like VMware Workstation can.
Too bad. Luckily, IrishMike posted a workaround for this about 7 years ago.
The easiest is if you keep these names very similar:
- Display Name of the VM (that shows up in your Virtual Machine Library)
- Name of the directory
- Name of the .VMDK files
- Name fo the .VMX files
I do moste of the editing from the console, and used this trick to edit text files from the console.
These are the steps to clone from “master” to “clone” with a little bit of post-editing from my side:
Re: How do we “copy” an entire virtual machine?
- Copy the directory holding all the “master” VMware Fusion files to a new one (lets call the directories “master.vmware” and “clone.vmware”).
- Inside the “clone.vmware” directory, change all the files named “master.” to “clone.”
- Inside the “clone.vmware” directory, remove these subdirectories if they exist:
– any directory ending in “.lck”
– Applications
– appListCache
– caches- Then in the same directory, edit the .vmx file changing all occurrences of “master” to “clone”
– any “fileName” entry
– any “displayName” entry
– any “nvram” entry
– any “extendedConfigFile”
– any “checkpoint.vmState”- Also in the same directory, edit the main .vmdk file and change the mane of the file from “master-flat.vmdk” to “clone-flat.vmdk”
- Then from the Finder or from VMware Fusion, open the .vmx file
- Finally tell VMware Fusion that you “copied” the VM, so it gets a new hardware ID.
Then we’re off and running.
–jeroen
via: VMware Communities: How do we “copy” an entire virtual….
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