Proposal for cloudstack: cloning a VM

Currently, cloudstack does not have an option for the user to clone a VM. In order to achieve a full clone, we have to manually handle it by using snapshots, new disk and then new attachment. The manual way of creating a VM causes extra overhead for the user like the temporary snapshots should also be manually cleaned up after the steps. This may influence the reliability of the system since issues may increase for a missing step. This proposal aims to integrate all these steps into one API and one UI interface and the whole project focus consists of mainly three parts:

• An independent integrated full clone API (adapt to different hypervisors, ones support clone and ones doesn’t)
• An UI interface providing the clone option
• Implementation steps for updating the related db information table