Does VMWare Fusion 2 have the "linked clones" feature ala VMWare Workstation?

Question

The title pretty much says it all, but for those of you who are familiar with both the latest VMWare Fusion and the "linked clone" feature found in VMWare workstation, can you confirm whether this feature is currently present or absent in Fusion?

This could be considered an update of this previous question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/61775/replacing-virtual-pcserver-with-vmware-fusionserver-for-development-environments

That specified that Fusion does not support linked clones, but it looked like it may possibly have been written before Fusion 2.0 was out.

I tend to suspect that it does not, since the info on the respective product pages highlights the feature for Workstation but does not mention it at all for Fusion.

Answer 1

VMWare fusion 2 does not have a clone feature like VMWorkstation. You will have to physically copy the vm folder to a new location to "clone" the vm. Pain yes, but it's what we have done with VMServer for years.

Answer 2

fusion 2 has full support for linked clones, except for actually creating them. If you use workstation to create clones, you can run them in fusion 2 without any issues or features missing.

Answer 3

VMWare Fusion does support linked clones, but doesn't give you a GUI to create them.

Take a quick look at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5611 for details. In short, you'll create the base VM, copy it's virtual hard drive to a safe place, then manually generate new VMs, using the initial hard drive as a base. It's a very straightforward process and you end up with exactly the results you desire.