When cloning a vm how do you select specific drives to clone only

[gusnole9399]

Instead of getting the entire vm's set of virtual disks.

I have a vm that has a primary vmdk of 20GB, but has 10 additional virtual disks adding up to a lot of space, I want to be able to clone only the vm's primary drive and one of the other drives but not the rest. I tried the "Edit VM Hardware(Experimental)" option and removed the virtual disks I didn't want and when I hit OK to clone it still ends up cloning all of the drives.

Am I missing something, there has to be a way to do this, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Troy_Clavell]

cloning is probably not your best option. You should consider using VMware Converter to do a V2V. This way you can choose what drives you want to bring and what drives you don't want to bring. Plus, it will give you the option to resize if you wish.

[RParker]

Troy is the man with plan. He is correct, it would be easier with VM Converter...

[Mohammad1982]

Its good to use the VMware converter in this case, however if you need another method, Please follow the below instructions

Use " vmkfstools -i " to clone the primary virtual disk and the one that you want

This process needs cloning of the disks one at a time or you can open two ssh sesions to do it simultaneously.

once the clone process is completed then, create a new VM and point the cloned disks to the VM and power it on.

[gusnole9399]

Thanks for the replies, I think I'm going to go with the Converter, seems to be the easiest method.

Kind of wish VM would build some of the nice functions of the Converter directly into the Cloning process in vCenter.

[continuum]

Converter the easiest procedure ? - how so ?

the vmfstools -i does exactly what you want and you do not need to cross fingers




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