VirtualBox Linked Clones Deletion

Question

This is a 2 part question...

I have created a Master VM, a Full Clone of the master for Dev work, and I want to try some new code, it will have implications to the OS, and the MySQL DB that is currently installed. I don't want to mess up the clone so I will spawn a new clone from it. My question is if I create a linked clone, run the code I put on it and choose to delete the linked clone, will it like a snapshot merge the code back into the VM that I created a link from or will the diff discs just be removed?

The second part to this is... if the linked clone is just deleted and not merged back into the originating VM, what happens with the snapshot that the originating VM takes? Is is safe to delete/merge or just keep spawning linked clones off of it?

I have the hard drive space, I just dont feel like waiting 30 minutes to spawn full clones for each new potential feature.

Answer 1

This is partly a comment and partly an answer.

The comment: Is there a reason not use linked clones? This is an archetypal use case for a linked clone.

The Answer:

Rather than creating a full clone, use a linked clone. The creation time will be a few minutes, is very small amount of data, and can easily be moved. One of the great advantages of a linked clone is that a common base VM can be easily shared among several developers.

Each use case you have - whether installing new versions of software, testing new versions of code, etc can easily be done in a customized linked clone VM. This makes it easy to run multiple different environments.

Another benefit of the linked clone is sharing a common base VM. For instance I created a VM with the development tools which are common amongst all of us, and then shared it as a linked clone to all the others. This ensures a uniformity of tools/configuration.

Hope this helps you ( past ) question.

-daniel