Duplicate Virtual Machines

Create virtual machines by copying a previous one

Virtual machine environments allow to create vm from scratch, of course, but it is also possible and sometimes useful to be able to create one vm as a perfect copy of another one you already have.

There are issues you have to take care of, anyway:

• a duplicated vm will have exactly the same hostname of the original one
• a duplicated vm will have exactly the same mac address(es) of the original one
• a duplicated vm will have exactly the same ssh keys of the original one
• a duplicated vm will have exactly the same SID keys of the original one (windows machines only)

if both the original vm and the "copy" are running together in the same network, this will cause issues and/or unsafe vm environments.

How to change vm hostname

• Linux

It should be sufficient to

• • change the /etc/hostname file content to the new hostname
  • change the /etc/hosts file contet accordingly

and then reboot the machine