To remove a virtual machine which you no longer need, right-click on
it in the Manager's VM list select "Remove" from the context menu that
comes up.
A confirmation window will come up that allows you to select whether
the machine should only be removed from the list of machines or whether
the files associated with it should also be deleted.
The "Remove" menu item is disabled while a machine is
running.
To experiment with a VM configuration, test different guest OS levels
or to simply backup a VM, VirtualBox can create a full or a linked copy of
an existing VM.
[5]
A wizard will guide you through the clone process:
This wizard can be invoked from the context menu of the Manager's VM
list (select "Clone") or the "Snapshots" view of the selected VM. First
choose a new name for the clone. When you select
Reinitialize the MAC address of all network cards
every network card get a new MAC address assigned. This is useful when
both, the source VM and the cloned VM, have to operate on the same network.
If you leave this unchanged, all network cards have the same MAC address
like the one in the source VM. Depending on how you invoke the wizard you
have different choices for the cloning operation. First you need to decide
if the clone should be linked to the source VM or a fully independent clone
should be created:
- Full clone: In this mode all
depending disk images are copied to the new VM folder. The clone
can fully operate without the source VM.
- Linked clone: In this mode new
differencing disk images are created where the parent disk images
are the source disk images. If you selected the current state of
the source VM as clone point, a new snapshot will be created
implicitly.
After selecting the clone mode, you need to decide about what exactly
should be cloned. You can always create a clone of the
current state only or
all. When you select
all, the current state and in addition all
snapshots are cloned. Have you started from a snapshot which has additional
children, you can also clone the
current state and
all children. This creates a clone starting with this
snapshot and includes all child snaphots.
The clone operation itself can be a lengthy operation depending on
the size and count of the attached disk images. Also keep in mind that
every snapshot has differencing disk images attached, which need to be
cloned as well.
The "Clone" menu item is disabled while a machine is running.
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