virtualbox.org

I have a pre-configured VM that I would like to clone. I don't care about the contents of the hard-drive since I will be doing a PXE install right afterwards. Having the hard-drive configuration (i.e. dynamic vs. fixed and maximum size) would be useful but not necessary. The network configuration is kind of complicated I would like to copy this information. The MACs don't have to be the same; in fact it would be better if they are different.

I have been simply doing a Full Clone and installing over top of this. This takes several minutes. This is pretty simple but is there a faster way that's not overly-complicated?

I am assuming that it doesn't matter which platform I'm using. In case it does, I am running Linux guests on a Linux host.

No, that way is the fastest method to do what you want. There are faster cloning methods, but they would not do what you want.

You say you don't care about the disk contents since you'll be doing a PXE install, but presumably the latter is for an application, and you do require the VM to have a working OS preinstalled. Otherwise you would just leave the VM blank, and cloning would be uber-quick.

Actually, the PXE boot installs a pristine operating system. It would work on a blank hard drive. The system I am cloning is a working system that I want to preserve but I would like to set up a new system that I can overwrite but with the same network setup.