Creating a Linked Clone in VMware Workstation
Transcript
welcome to our second video in our series on installing a vmware vsphere lab within vmware workstation in this video we'll learn how to clone a vm it's important to clone vms or clone vms from a template because it will save us a lot of time in the long run a little work up front for a lot of benefit in the back end so we're going to first take a snapshot of our vm we're doing this for two reasons one if we mess up the process we
use the power of vmware workstation to back out of that mistake and two it gives us the ability to create clones either based on the original vm that we're setting up or on the video or on our template so we're gonna say name is pre sysprep and we're going to use a standard tool that comes out of the box with windows server to prepare a server for cloning and it is the microsoft sys prep tool so we're going to run that and we're going to choose
the out of the box experience option and we're going to choose to shut down the system after that because then we'll be ready to actually create the template now the image is actually ready to be cloned but a little bit of housekeeping i like a lot of jonathan's recommendations for organization so we're going to create a folder called templates and we're going to move our server template into that folder we create another folder called labs and when we create our clone we're going to put it
in that folder so if we right click on our server template we can go to clone walk through the wizard and this is the point if the server was powered down we could choose to clone from the snapshot but of course we want the assist prepped version of the server and we get two options create linked clone or click full clone the difference between the two if i create a linked clone that means that the new vm will just create a delta file between the original
vm file vmdk file and the cloned vmdk file this saves a ton of disk pace my advice which is a little bit different than what jonathan put on his blog post have the this is an exception where i would have that server template file on the ssd so similar in the vdi environment if we have a bunch of clones reading off of the same set of vmdks if that's on ssd then my experience in vmware workstation is that you'll see a much bigger performance gain opposed
to having it on your spinning disc if you have a system with multiple uh disks as i do so we're gonna go ahead and create a link clone we're going to name the link clone and this is going to be our domain controller so we'll name it something uh to the along the lines of virtualized vg dc o1 and again i would recommend putting this probably on a fat disc it really wouldn't matter much especially if you have the uh base file on the ssd and
we'll move it to our labs folder and that's it the clone is complete we can boot that up and then we'll walk through the initial windows configuration and we'll we're all set to create the domain controller in our next post thanks
