I'm running workstation 7.1.3 and I was wondering if there was any way to copy a virtual machine while it's running. Can you just copy the files on the file system while it's running or are there risks to doing this?
Hot Copy a vmware virtual machine
vmware-workstation
Best Answer
I use VMWare Player and regularly suspend the VM, which snapshots and saves the running state. I then copy the entire folder off to a NAS backup drive. You can restore that VM later just fine.
Live copy while running is not possible in VMware Player or Workstation. Even using Windows VSS to snapshot the disk underneath a running VM is fraught with danger - you have copied the windows disk state for a running machine, but without the contents of RAM. This might later work, it would not resume where the snapshot was taken but it might boot. It is not a practice that I would rely on.