Friday, October 14, 2011

VirtualBox: Creating new VM by duplicating existing one

The other day i tried to create a new VM by duplicating an existing one. Everything worked perfectly ... except all network interface were disable. And it was impossible to mount up those network interfaces.

If you duplicated a new VM from an existing one, you have to do a couple of things. First MAC addresses should be changed in new VM.

Then once the VM is created, disabled all network interface and boot it up. Once the machine is started, there's a couple of files to update for the hostname. I'm using a Debian squeeze, so path may change in other distributions:

/etc/hosts 
/etc/hostname

Then you need to need to edit  /etc/udev/rules.d/.  What happens is it maps the "new" mac address to a new interface. You just need to remove the old one and rename the new one (thanks to the solution from this forum: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=7749)