Clone option not visible in Vmware player

Question

I am new to this vmware player and am working on version 'workstation 9.0 virtual machine'.

Now I have made a virtual machine and I want to clone it. But when I right click on the machine which I created there is no option of clone coming in it.

Solution

VMware Player does not have a clone option. The product is designed to be a simpler version of VMware Workstation so it does not have many features that are found in Workstation.

However, cloning a VM manually is not that difficult. Googling "vmware player clone" gave me several hits, the first one is this: http://aztcs.org/meeting_notes/winhardsig/virtualmachines/vmware/Cloning_VM_in_VMwarePlayer--Windows.pdf

The overall process is:

1. Copy the VM directory to a new directory.
2. Launch VMWare Player and load the new VM (.vmx file) from it.
3. Edit VM properties to rename it.
4. Start the new VM. When prompted, select "I have copied the VM". VMWare fill fix everything else.

Comments

[Sridhar Sarnobat]

I can confirm that this works with 3.0.1 build-227600. I'm guessing it used to be a lot more complicated with older versions. I know that last time I used VirtualBox a few years ago I had to use a special command line tool (though it wasn't too difficult).