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Table Of Contents
7 (Optional) On the Customize hardware page, configure the virtual machine hardware and options and
click Next.
You can leave the defaults and configure the virtual machine hardware and options later. For more
information, see Chapter 5 Configuring Virtual Machine Hardware and Chapter 6 Configuring Virtual
Machine Options
Important If you chose to use PMem storage for the virtual machine, its default hard disk, the new
hard disks that you configure, and the NVDIMM devices that you add to the virtual machine all share
the same PMem resources. So, you must adjust the size of the newly added devices in accordance
with the amount of the PMem available to the host. If any part of the configuration requires attention,
the wizard alerts you.
8 On the Ready to complete page, review the virtual machine settings and click Finish.
The new virtual machine appears in the inventory.
Cloning a Virtual Machine with Instant Clone
You can use the Instant Clone technology to create powered on virtual machines from the running state of
another powered on virtual machine. The result of an Instant Clone operation is a new virtual machine
that is identical to the source virtual machine. With Instant Clone you can create new virtual machines
from a controlled point in time. Instant cloning is very convenient for large scale application deployments
because it ensures memory efficiency and allows for creating numerous virtual machines on a single host.
The result of an Instant Clone operation is a virtual machine that is called a destination virtual machine.
The processor state, virtual device state, memory state, and disk state of the destination virtual machine
are identical to those of the source virtual machine. To avoid network conflicts, you can customize the
virtual hardware of the destination virtual machine during an Instant Clone operation. For example, you
can customize the MAC addresses of the virtual NICs or the serial and parallel port configurations of the
destination virtual machine. vSphere 6.7 does not support customization of the guest OS of the
destination virtual machine. For information about manual guest OS customization, see the vSphere Web
Services SDK Programming Guide.
During an Instant Clone operation, the source virtual machine is stunned for a short period of time, less
than 1 second. While the source virtual machine is stunned, a new writable delta disk is generated for
each virtual disk and a checkpoint is taken and transferred to the destination virtual machine. The
destination virtual machine then powers on by using the source's checkpoint. After the destination virtual
machine is fully powered on, the source virtual machine also resumes running.
Instant Cloned virtual machines are fully independent vCenter Server inventory objects. You can manage
Instant Cloned virtual machines like regular virtual machines without any restrictions.
In vSphere 6.7, you can Instant Clone a virtual machine only through the API calls.
For more information about Instant Clone, see the vSphere Web Services SDK Programming Guide.
vSphere Virtual Machine Administration
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