

Once you have filled all the necessary parameters and press clone you will see cloning will be started. VirtualBox Clone Settings Clone Virtual Machine Keep Disk Names, Hardware UUIDs: This will retain the same Disk name and hardware UUID during cloning.

MAC Address Policy: when cloning you have the option to stick with the same MAC address or create a new one for your network interface.I don’t have any snapshot configured so I am choosing “ Current Machine State“. Snapshots: There are two snapshot options that specify whether to take a snapshot of the current machine state or everything.Once you initiate the clone, click on ‘ Expert Mode‘ and there are few parameters we have to configure.

The cloning option will be disabled if VM is in a running state so make sure VM is turned off. Open VirtualBox Manager, choose the virtual machine to be cloned and right-click on the VM, and choose option clone. Cloning a VirtualBox Virtual MachineĬreating a clone is a very simple process. Note: The time of cloning a virtual machine relies on the size and the number of connected disk images. If you remove the parent disk then cloned machine will not work.

What if you need to repeat the same procedure for 5, 10, or 15 more virtual machines? Do you think it is easy to set up everything manually for all the virtual machines? It is a time-consuming task, right? This is where the cloning process comes into play.Ĭloning is a process where your disk images from one machine will be copied to spin up a new Guest VM. This is ok if you have just one virtual machine to work with. After that, there are so many steps like installing packages, hardening the OS, updating drivers, configuring development environments, etc. Installing a fresh operating system on VirtualBox is easy and can be done in a short time.
