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Clone a VirtualBox Guest VM

Ryan — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:23:20 +0000

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.

Find your MAC address with ifconfig

Ryan — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:06:53 +0000

You can find the MAC address of your system at the command line by using the ifconfig command. The ifconfig command will show you information on all your network interfaces. If no arguments are given ifconfig displays the status of the currently active interfaces.

You have to run this command as root or use sudo.

# ifconfig

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr a1:b2:c3:d4:e5:f6  
          inet addr:192.168.2.11  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1492  Metric:1
          RX packets:4007 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4246 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:3292271 (3.1 MiB)  TX bytes:994922 (971.6 KiB)

Your MAC address is displayed in the HWaddr field.

Find the MAC address on a Windows machine

Ryan — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:54:48 +0000

For whatever reason lets assume you find yourself on a Windows machine and you need to obtain the MAC address of its network adapter. Do the following.

Go to Start -> Run which will bring up a text box. In this box type cmd. A command prompt will appear.

Type this is the terminal.

ipconfig /all

A lot of information will fly by but the MAC address is labeled Physical Address. The number is 6 pairs of hexidecimal numbers separated by dashes. It will look like this.

Physical Address . . . . . . . . . : a1-b2-c3-d4-e5-f6

If the machine has more than one network adapter (wired and wireless), then you will see an address for each one.

This will work with Windows 2000/XP/Vista.