When to clone a VM ?

The technic of working with clones can vary a lot in different scenarios - lets talk about some different scenarios first.

A: your company runs a webshop: during summer you sell pumps, during winter you sell moonboots. After every season the webshop production data will be transferred to your tax-department.

B: your company offers IT-classes. Every week you have a new group of students. So after the end of each week  you destroy all productions VMs and start over wish new copies on mondays.

C: your company runs a helpdesk service. Every helpdesk support-user gets a fresh copy of the master when je joins the team. Every user gets ome disk for his personal longterm use. And as you have to support various products you supply additional disks with all the new details for the new product versions every few weeks or so.

In all 3 scenarios a skilled administrator creates a master - including the OS and all the additional tools.
When the functionality works as expected the admin adds a new user and prepares everything so that no license-problems, mac-address issues or other problems will stand in the way during the clone process.

For the production phase he adds 2 more disks: one for user-data and one for the production data.
After the end of the production phase  you have 3 vmdks in each scenario: os-and-tools.vmdk, user-data.vmdk and production-data.vmdk.

In scenario A you keep the production-data.vmdk and send it to the tax-department. The other 2 vmdks can be thrown away.
In scenario B you discard all 3 vmdks - without having to inspect the 3 vmdks before destruction.
In scenario C you always keep the accumulated user-data.vmdk and provide new clones of os-and-tools.vmdk and production-data.vmdk when ever a new product needs to be supported.

So you can pick the best clone procedure for a given scenario - linked clones, full clones and sometimes simple copies may be used ...

Ulli