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I've got a list of virtual machines. I know that most of them are only clones of a few base ones. How to determine if a VM is a full clone or a linked clone? Do linked clones have their own disks or are these only differencing images of their base?
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A full clone is a completely separate copy of a VM that shares no system resources with the parent once it's running. A linked clone, on the other hand, continues to share virtual disks with the parent after it's created. Since it runs independently, a full clone generally has faster performance than a linked one.
A Full Clone is a complete and independent copy of the original parent VM that operates like a brand new virtual machine. A Linked Clone is a copy of a virtual machine created and managed with the View Composer.
Full Clone: Copies all dependent disk images to the new VM folder. A full clone can operate fully without the source VM. Linked Clone: Creates new differencing disk images based on the source VM disk images.
For a linked clone, you'll find a line "CloneOf" with the parent/master information in the GUI (Virtual Machine Details), and you can also see this entry in the VM's . vmsd file.
Basically these are the definitions:
- Full-clone: A full clone is an independent copy of a virtual machine that shares nothing with the parent virtual machine after the cloning operation. Ongoing operation of a full clone is entirely separate from the parent virtual machine
- Linked-clone: A linked clone is a copy of a virtual machine that shares virtual disks with the parent virtual machine in an ongoing manner. This conserves disk space, and allows multiple virtual machines to use the same software installation
Linked clones have their own virtual disk but this is just a differential disk that contains new files or whatever that the parent virtual machine didn't have when the snapshot of that linked clone was created.
The main difference is that full-clone are independent virtual machines and linked-clones are dependent virtual machines because linked clones need the parent virtual disk as their base-virtual-disk.
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