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Copying a Virtual Machine Within the Server

Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition allows you to create a complete copy of a particular virtual machine (in respect of all the virtual machine data and resources parameters), or a clone. This saves your time because you do not have to think of setting up the virtual machine configuration parameters and the like. Moreover, you can create a number of virtual machine clones at a sitting.

In Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition-based systems, you can use the pctl clone command to copy a virtual machine within the given physical server. For example, you can create a clone of the MyVM virtual machine and assign the Cloned_VM name to it as follows:

# pctl clone MyVM --name ClonedVM

Clone the MyVM VM to the VM ClonedVM...

The VM has been successfully cloned.

Notice that you can create clones of stopped virtual machines only.

Checking the Cloned Virtual Machine

To check that your virtual machine has been successfully moved, run this command:

# pctl list -a

STATUS IP_ADDR NAME

stopped 10.0.10.115 MyVM

stopped 10.0.10.115 ClonedVM

As you can see from the example above, the clone the MyVM virtual machine (ClonedVM) has been successfully created. However, before starting to use this clone, you should assign a different IP address to it because the current IP address is identical to that of MyVM. Refer to Performing Initial Configuration to learn how you can do it.

Configuring the Default Directories

When cloning a virtual machine, you can also override the /vz/dest_VM_Name.pvm directory used by default to store the files of a cloned virtual machine (where dest_VM_Name denotes the name of the resulting virtual machine). For example, for the ClonedVM virtual machine, this directory is /vz/ClonedVM.pvm. To store the files of the ClonedVM virtual machine in a different directory, you can run the following command:

# pctl clone MyVM --name ClonedVM --location /vz/VM_directory

In this case all virtual machine files will be placed to the /vz/VM_directory directory. Notice that the specified directory must exist on the server; otherwise, the command will fail.