Release Notes

63 Dell Virtual Storage Manager: Installation Considerations and Local Data Protection | 2079-BP-V-VSM
7.5 Creating clones from snapshots
The ability to clone a virtual machine has been a long-time feature of vSphere, enabling virtual machines (including a
completely installed and configured operating system) to be deployed in minutes. Recent versions of vSphere have
enabled this even while the virtual machine is running. However, this clone functionality has not enabled the ability to
turn back the clock and get a clone of the state a virtual machine was previously in.
There are several reasons why this may be desired:
• Ability to test the impact of changes on a known identical copy of the production environment
• Concerns of impacting production environment by cloning live production virtual machine
• Providing a copy of a production environment for testing, or data-mining
Now that VMware snapshot functionality has been offloaded to the array, the ability to leverage the array and VSM
snapshot capabilities come into play. Using the same process described in section 7.4.2, a clone of a virtual machine
can be created from a snapshot in a matter of seconds without impacting the production environment or enabling the
previous state of the virtual machine to be accessed.
Note: Regardless of the reason for creating a clone of a virtual machine, it will be an exact match for the existing
virtual machine. This means that the hostname, IP address, and application name space is identical, and should be
isolated or altered so it does not conflict with the production environment.