Linked Clones for VMware Fusion with Somatic
Update: As of Fusion 6, this utility is no longer needed, as Fusion 6 includes proper cloning capabilities. In the course of my day job, I need to be able to create VMs to try out my companies software as well as show customers how they might use our products to solve their problems. To speed up the process of creating new and one-off VMs, I created a little utility called Somatic to help me do that much faster and by using much less disk space than copying a VM. I use a Mac and, since the company that I work for produces a pretty good desktop virtualization solution for the Mac , I use VMware Fusion to host my VMs. One challenge that I have is that those VMs take up a lot of space per VM, and that eats up the SSD in my MacBook fairly quickly. VMware Workstation for Windows has a fairly nice feature that allows you to create VMs that are based on other VMs called Linked Clones. Linked Clones allow you to create separate VM that points to the disks of anoth...