How to clone VM with its snapshot?

[supcxc]

I'm in a test team which uses a lot of different OS to perform testing. It's very valuable to use VM to setup env.

The solution in my mind is that, install all OSs on a VM and make clean snapshots for each of them, so that we can switch to any OS snapshot later. And after we have a VM with all OS snapshots, we can clone it to another VM.

The problem is that, the snapshots in original VM can't be cloned to the new VM. Only the current OS is cloned to new VM.

Do we have any way to clone all snapshots to an new VM?

Thanks a lot!

[Texiwill]

Hello,

A few things. Snapshots are really temporary items you do not want to run VMs with snapshots for very long as they are fifos that contain every changed block from the previous snapshot etc. They are useful but not something I would use. Too many snapshots or snapshot files too large, and you end up with odd networking and other issues related to performance.

I had a similar setup and instead of using snapshots, I kept golden templates of the VMs in question. Whenever a person needed a new VM at the golden level, we just deployed from the template as a full VM.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

SearchVMware Blog: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/

Blue Gears Blogs - http://www.itworld.com/ and http://www.networkworld.com/community/haletky

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[supcxc]

Thanks Texiwill,

That's a good point! And I'd like to know more about the "golden template".

You know that we have to change the system configuration of a template after deploying. What I have in mind is that we need to change the MAC, IP, hostname, etc.

Is there any other issue we need to pay attention when making a template and deploying a template?

Thanks in advance.

[riker82]

best practises to afford are to use them toghether with customization specifications... This is true (depend on your OS2) for vm's users, hostname, AD domain, license information (windows), IP address....

for mac address and other "virtual hardware" modification, use snapshot.

What I do when I need to clone a snapshotted vm, is using vcb to backup and restore it.... with that deal I can keep whatever I want...