cloning failed

[tatung70]

I have a scheduled task that shuts down a VM. Then another one that clones the VM and finally one that powers the VM back on. My issue is that after the first iteration completes successfully, the rest fails with an error during the clone stating a clone for xxx already exists.

Is there a way to do this so that it would either delete the clone already there or perhaps keep x # of them there?

Thanks

[VMmatty]

Have you looked into using any scripting tools to help you accomplish this? You can use VMware vSphere PowerCLI to schedule these clones and delete the clone if it already exists or potentially name each clone something different. You'll need some knowledge of PowerShell scripting but there are many resources available to you on the Internet.

PowerCLI can be downloaded here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/

What about using VMware Converter to schedule V2V conversions? Have you considered that? I'm not sure if it gets around the problem of having the clone exist already but it is probably worth looking into.