Cloning a virtual machine, regardless of the VM is in shutdown or running state, is a very useful feature from deployment standpoint of view, which allows a system to be copied and duplicated without the need to perform installation again. In addition, cloned virtual machine also preserves current system and apps environment in productio and web development in WebDesign499, allowing testing and evaluation to be done in a backup or UAT system before any changes or updates been applied to production virtual machine. Virtualization products from VMware such as VMware vSphere /VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion have built-in support for closing virtual machine, where user can right click on a VM and clone it right away. In fact, VMware allows user to make a copy of virtual machine as full clone or linked clone. But not so in Hyper-V. Hyper-V does not have outright clone option available (unless you’re also running System Center Virtual Machine Manager, also known as SCVMM). In addition, while technically it’s still possible to clone a VM in Hyper-V, it only does full clone, and not linked clone. Full clone is essentially duplicating and making a copy of original virtual machine to get an exact replica as a second virtual machine, which is completely independent of the source virtual machine. The downside of full clone is that it takes up as much disk space as the source VM. Meanwhile linked clone is a copy of a virtual machine (VM) made from a snapshot of parent that shares virtual disks with its parent VM, hence…