inevu wrote: Just out of curiosity.... Why is the ability to create Linked Clones not available on Fusion 5? You would expect that a $99 virtualization software would let you perform these basic tasks...
Well when you find out the answer to that come back and let us know. There are many of us from the very beginning of VMware Fusion asked for a professional version with all of the features of VMware Workstation and what we got with VMware Fusion 5 Professional is very sad indeed. 
Ulli Hankeln wrote: If you compare Fusion with Workstation it looks like the designers thought that MAC OS users are not as smart as Windows or Linux users so they only implemented the idiot proof features.
Let me remind you that per a post made recently you too are now a Mac user! 
But creating linked clones is a simple task.Create a snapshot.
Copy snapshot vmdk into a new directory and create a new vmx-file that uses this snapshot-vmdk.Thats basically all there is to do
Sorry but IMO that is not basically all there is to it and Workstation does the entire process through a convenient wizard while the process with VMware Fusion is a manual process. Which of course for users like ourselves, we do it manually without giving it a second though because we know what were doing and don't have to ask.
In VMware Fusion one must also manually change the "parentFileNameHint" in the "DiskDiscriptor File", which is not always an easy task for the non-technical user especially with monolithic disks. Also to protect the Parent .vmdk it's permissions should be set to Read Only so one doesn't accidentally break the Linked Clones if the Parent Virtual Machine's Base Disk accidentally get's modified because it was not set to Read Only .
Also IIRC VMware Workstation implements some additional checks to help a user from accidentally trashing Linked Clones. May via options placed in the .vmx file, I just forget at the moment.