Afternoon.  a philosophical question came to mind a short while ago as a result of a conversation with a co-worker:  when is the appropriate time to clone a vm?  Deploying from template or using sysprep excluded, my opinion would be the creation of a test vm from the original which I agree that it is the easiest, best  way to duplicate a vm for test if needed.  

Another way I could ask this question: is if you build a production vm and prior to putting into production, do you clone the vm you are building for a test vm? Or do you build a test vm and clone it to a production vm?

Second philosophical question is do you clone when a vm is live/ in production?  my answer is not if we can help it

Third philosophical question is:  if you clone a vm for the purposes of upgrade testing, do you promote the clone to production afterward?

I was been bit in the past  by a duplicate windows sid\MAC address\Licensing  issue when doing this so this is what is causing me to revisit this.  

either way, if you have any thoughts i would appreciate to hear them