The beauty of using VMWare is that it is very easy to magically “create” a new computer by simply copying the base vmware files of any already existing vmware instance. Are the wheels in your head starting to turn like they did in mine? Probably so. You are thinking to yourself, “Self, if I create a base windows and a base linux machine, get all the updates and then just clone them, I will save myself a TON of time”. You are absolutely correct. Not only that, but if you ever have a motherboard failure, getting a system up and running from your vmware backups is a simply as installing the vmware server base on a system and then reinstalling your backed up VMDK files of all your virtual machines. Pretty cool huh.
The main file that need is the vmdk file. On a CentOS base server setup, these files are stored in folders in the /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines directory. To create a new virtual machine from a base virtual machine, do the following…
- Create a new directory for the new machine in the Virtual Machines folder
- Copy vmdk and the vmx files from the base machine folder to the new folder.
- Add Virtual machine to inventory
- Rename the server and edit the notes.
- Depending on how you had your base system setup, you may need to edit static MAC addresses, Host Names, etc.