Creating a Clone of a Fusion VM

This will be a quick post. I was searching for a way of implementing linked clones in Fusion, when I happened upon this posting. The crux of the post was "Does anybody know if something easier has been found for cloning VMW *Fusion*?"

The answer is yes. It's easy. But it's not inside VMware Fusion itself. On Mac OS, the VM is created inside a folder with a .vmwarevm suffix. This tells Mac OS to run the VM inside Fusion. But it's just a folder with a .vmx and .vmdk and so on inside.

So if you want to clone the VM, make a copy of the folder. While w're on the subject, in case you're new to Macs, you can get at the contents of the folder (or any .app for that matter) by choosing "Show package contents":

Back to cloning the VM. Our copy takes a while as you'd expect. This one is some 3GB in size, so it took a few minutes on a single spindle laptop harddrive.

When the VM starts up in Fusion, it will have the same name as the folder that it resides in initially. You can rename this as you see fit. (This does not rename things INSIDE the VMX file.)