Cloning a VM

Owned by Thomas Carton
Last updated: May 25, 2012 by Anne Wright
3 min read
  1. First login with the VMware vSphere Client 
  2. Select a VM
  3. Click on the "Summary" tab
  4. Right-click on the datatstore and select "Browse Datastore" 
     
  5. This triggers a new window, the "Datastore Browser"
     
  6. Create a new folder (here it's "bt8") just below the root folder
  7. the select the root folder on the left pane so that all second level directories appear on the right pane
  8. Right click ont the VM you want to clone and select "Copy"
     
  9. Left click on the newly created directory, right-click in the right pane and select "Paste"
  10. Once the operation is finished (might take a while) you can reboot the source VM if you wish.
  11. Go to the subfolder of the newly created BTX, enter the subfolder , select all its contents, right-click and select '"Move".
  12. Move everything to the upper level 
    1. I know it seems a bit weird but I've read many threads encouraging this instead of pasting the content directly into the newly created folder
  13. Point to the .vmx file.
  14. Rename it according to the new scheme
  15. Right click it and select "Add to Inventory"
  16. Close the Datastore Browser
  17. The new VM appears ont the right panel, right click it and select "Edit Settings ..."
     
  18. On the "Hardware" tab click on the Network adapter line and set the MAC adress that corresponds to one of the available IPs
    1. Beware that screwing with this will get you in an infinite loop with the OVH support team in order to unblacklist your server.
    2. Simple rule = one IP adress on one VM with its associated MAC adress. Everything else will fail.
       
  19. Now that server has a MAC adress you can start it.
  20. Switch to the "Console tab" and log into the machine. We have to set the IP adress and the hostname.
  21. Edit the "interfaces" config file
  22. Change the values of the "address" and "broadcast" keys with the IP associated with the MAC address
  23. Restart the networking service
     
  24. Lets also update the hostname
  25. Let's give it a consistent hostname
     
  26. Try to ping google to see that network is operating correctly
     
  27. Voilà. You can now SSH to the machine, stop clicking and start working.