Steps to Clone Virtual Machines in Oracle VirtualBox

Hello readers,  in our last post, we learnt about installing Oracle Virtual box and deploying a Centos 7 Linux machine using the vdi image.  In case you have a scenario to create multiple machines with similar configurations,  you don't need to repeat the steps to install or deploy a new machine.  You can use Cloning feature of Virtual Box to create more machines.

I was setting up a Lab environment for creating Kubernetes cluster and deployed machine 1 on Oracle Virtual box, to create remaining nodes of the cluster, I used the cloning feature of Virtual Box t that is a really great feature.

Steps to Clone a Virtual Machine in Oracle Virtual machine

Power off the machine that you want to clone.  Make sure the virtual machine is powered off before starting the clone steps else the option will be greyed out or disabled.

Right click on the machine, you want to clone and click on Clone option.

In the next step, you will come across below UI , Enter the name of machine and I have used the Mac Address Policy as "Generate new MAC addresses for all network adapters"

This option makes sure that the clone VM don't get the same MAC address assigned as that of the source VM

You may leave the Additional Options unchecked.

In the next step, you need to choose between Full clone or Linked clone,  Full clone creates a full copy of your virtual hard disk while linked clone does not create full copy of virtual hard disk and helps to save disk space.

For my use case,  Linked clone option was fine.  You may use Full clone option as well depending upon your case.

Click on clone option and instantly your source VM will be cloned.

Power on both machines and they are ready to use.

Also read : 40 Linux commands for Beginners and intermediate users

Hope you are able to do the clone of your virtual machine following these steps.