When you’re running ESXI without vCenter, sometimes really niche things come up and you have situations that are kind of a pain without the appropriate management software so sometimes you gotta be a little janky.

  • So Primarily you’re going to want to power off the VM you want to clone.

  • Then you want to right click the VM and chose Edit Settings.

    • In the Virtual Hardware tab take not of the name and location of your Disk File.

  • Next you’re going to open your Datastore Browser by going Storage and in the Datastores tab click the Datastore Browser button.

  • Now that youre in the datastore browser create a directory at your prefered location with the name of the VM you would like.

  • Now youre going to go to the location of your original VM and copy the .vmdk and .vmx files into your new directory.

    • Sometimes this can take a while, if you want to monitor the process. Click the Monior sidebar, then the Tasks tab.

  • When your files are moved over, you can rename them if youd like.

  • Finally, right click the .vmx file and choose Register VM.

  • Rename the actual VM if youd like.