Clone VMWare Fusion Virtual Machines
This is a quick and dirty how-to on cloning VMWare Fusion virtual machines on Mac OS X.
1. Open Terminal App (Applications -> Utilities)
2. Go to where you stored your Virtual Machines by either typing the path or simply dragging and dropping your folder from the finder on to the terminal window. This will insert the path to the folder into your terminal.
cd /path/to/virtual-machines [ENTER]
3. Now simply copy the VMWare Fusion virtual machine using this command (no need to be root for this!)
cp -rvp Virtual-Machine.vmwarevm Cloned-VM.vmwarevm [ENTER]
Option -r will tell the cp (copy) app to copy folders (recursive)
Option -v tells cp to output information while it’s at work (verbose)
Option -p will keep existing file/folder permissions (preserve)
Remember that although the VMWare Fusion virtual machine appears to be a single file in the finder, it is in fact a folder containing everything VMWare Fusion needs to run the machine! Depending on how large your image is, it may take some time (hence we use the verbose option to let us know what it’s doing).
4. Drag the new virtual machine image from the finder window into the VMWare Fusion machine list and choose “Settings”. Note that VMWare Fusion will revert the name back to the original name of your cloned image!
5. In “Settings” simply click onto the name of the clone and change it to something of your choice.
6. Start the clone and VMWare Fusion will ask you whether it was moved or copied, select the latter (copied) and continue as normal. This question will only occur once.
7. Relax, enjoy and remember to share this info 
Thanks?
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Dirk says:
November 5th, 2009 at 18:31
Nice article, thanks for publishing it. I have a question about snapshots: the same snapshots that were associated with the original are still associated with the clone, which is both a blessing and a curse. Is there any way that you know of to disassociate the snapshots from the clone without deleting them from the original?