Having a clone of a particular VM is helpful whether you want to keep a backup vanilla image to use in the future, or create a cluster of identical machines that can run in parallel. This process is not well documented and can be slightly tricky. Hopefully this guide will help many of you through the process.

First off make sure your Guest virtual machine is shut down and not running or suspended and then run:
$ VBoxManage clonevdi source.vdi target.vdi

This may take a few minutes depending on the size of your VM
Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.8
(C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Clone hard disk created in format 'VDI'. UUID: c18b8549-33ab-41a1-8d66-25f884fef86a


Now that you have cloned your disk image, you need to create another VM. Duplicate the exact setup you had with the previous VM, making sure to create the same network adapters, shared folders, memory limits, etc.

The final step is to attach the cloned vdi to your new VM and start it.

Common Issues:

- VirtualBox will create new random MAC addresses for network adapters. This may or may not cause a problem. If it does you will have to reconfigure the device within the cloned VM if you want to use the old and cloned VM simultaneously, otherwise you can change the MAC address to be the same as the original.

- You may want to change the hostname as well as the IP address if it is statically allocated. Again if you are not running multiple machines simultaneously this may not be a problem for you.

Related posts

1. Setup SSH access between VirtualBox Host and Guest VMs
2. Mount a VirtualBox shared folder inside a guest VM
3. Setup USB support in Oracle VirtualBox

An ISO image is an archive file (disk image) of an optical disc using a conventional ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .ISO.

Many times is convenient to mount an ISO file directly instead of burning it to a CD first. Not only does this save on wasted CDs/DVDs, but allows much faster access to the ISO since it is on the hard disk itself.

Create the directory or mount point for the ISO.

$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disk

Use the mount command to mount the ISO

$ sudo mount -o loop disk_image.iso /mnt/disk

A loop device is a pseudo-device that makes a file accessible as a block device. You can now access the files within the ISO as you would a normal disk at the mount point ‘/mnt/disk’.

Related posts

1. Creating a Windows Boot Disk with a Linux Machine
2. Share a remote filesystem over SSH
3. Mount a VirtualBox shared folder inside a guest VM

The standard way to create a Windows boot disk is to have access to a Windows system. If you have access to a Linux system instead, and know a couple tricks, you can create boot disk as well.

The first thing to do is find a website that has the boot disks available for download. There are plenty of these out there so take your pick. The only thing you must specifically do is make sure that you download the disk image and not a self extracting executable file which must be run under Windows.

If the image is zipped unzip it.

$ unzip cdboot1.zip

Archive:  cdboot1.zip
  inflating: CDBOOT1.IMG

Check that the disk image is the correct size.

$ ls -lh CDBOOT1.IMG

-r--r--r-- 1 ryan ryan 1.5M 1999-12-07 12:00 CDBOOT1.IMG

Finally, you will use the dd command to copy the disk image to a blank floppy disk.

$ dd if=CDBOOT1.IMG of=/dev/fd0

Related posts

1. How to mount an ISO disk image
2. Find the MAC address on a Windows machine
3. Install the GRUB boot loader to the MBR