What is the difference between a clone and a snapshot

The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What's the difference between vmware linked clone vs snapshot Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 11 months ago. Active 6 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 4k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. You have a virtual machine and want to save the state before doing some changes and be able to restore the state: choose a snapshot You have a virtual machine and want to make a copy of it with minimum disk space used and want to work with the original 'and' the copy: choose a linked clone Linkes clones are also using snapshots.

Improve this answer. Thanks boboes, so if I have a VM machine that contains a server and am doing a development on that server, and it consumes memory and cpu, so do I take a snapshot each time I want to install service pack for the product on the VM or patches?

Snapshot, because you dont't need to run two instances of the server at the same time. Check out also features like persistent disks. A template is a master copy of a virtual machine that can be used to create and provision virtual machines. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Spread The Knowledge. Clone is the exact copy of the existing VM. Images can be set up to run automatically, in intervals of either every day or every week, up to a total of 50 images.

A common schedule is to configure an image to be taken every day of the week, with each new image overwriting the oldest image from seven days ago. Cloning a VM creates a duplicate copy of it. These clones can be edited, modified and updated in complete isolation to the original VM, without affecting it.

This is useful when creating staging environments or test copies of the data. As well as this, cloning saves time when setting up server farms or large numbers of similar-spec servers. Instead of having to create each server individually, you can spin up one VM and then clone it repeatedly to create VMs of the same spec. This is a significant timesaver when starting a project that requires multiple VMs. If the goal is to build a QA platform or a test environment, a clone is the suggested method to use.