Yep, it's that simple. You might also want to change the display name of the VM but that's it. 

It's no more complicated than cloning a Word document.

/Mikael

in fairness, since it's that easy, i think it's also very easy to implement that function into Fusion. probably just a few lines of code.

i would imagine that the only (optional) input that we have to enter into a msg box is the name of the cloned machine. and then the rest is done automatically (ctrl-c, ctrl-v, rename etc)

on a side note, if you have to rename the cloned machine several time, it is quite a different story than doing it one time. so, the cloning function could be useful in this case. so, it allows you to clone a VM multiple times, all at once. the clones' names may have suffixes as A, B, C, D... or 01, 02, 03... etc.

i can't think of any good reason why a person would want to clone multiple virtual machine though.

Not implemented in Fusion. Only available in Workstation on Windows and Linux.

/Mikael

There's really nothing missing from Fusion in this regard. The quickest way to create a clone is to use finder and drag one to an new name/place. No menu item in Fusion will do it faster. But recall that a clone is an exact copy of the original. Same IP, same host name, same email queue, same printer queue, same user logins, same licensed software (legal issue here) same cron jobs - same everything - which means if you have any pending mail, print jobs, or cron processes, the clone will attempt to process all that when you start up the vm. So when you turn on your clone it is no different than if you had turned on your original. And if the original is running already then you have some interesting  issues. That is what clones do.

I suspect that is not what you really want, but it may be. It is a excellent way to have mail disappear on you though (as a minimum), as both the clone and the original can start up with a mail client running, and both can busily grab mail when you're not paying attention, and if you had a print job pending because the priner was out of paper, it will still be there ready to print when turned back on. Clones come with what IBM Fellow Mike Cowlishaw calls "a high astonishment factor" if you don't understand them well.

Most likely you would like a template, or master copy of your original, and that would be everything mentioned above except no personality - no host name, no IP, no network configuration, nothing, in other words, that will get you in trouble the way a clone will. Fusion doesn't do that. And I doubt Parallels does, either, but it's been a very long time since I tossed out all my Parallels licenses.

My guess is VMWare Workstation does this, and of course ESX does, but you pay a premium for that.

What I would much rather see is some AppleScript libraries built into Fusion so some things can be scripted. One of those things could be a clone/template generating tool. It wouldn't take many lines of AppleScript code to write a tool to make a Linux template.