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This is a home lab, so nothing critical. I have a base Linux ISO I'm installing for all my VMs, but the install takes a long time, and even once it's done, I still have to go install a ton of updates and a few packages. I would like to start cloning my VM's off of a base VM which I keep up-to-date.

My first thought was just to copy the VHDX file and spin up a new machine connected to that, but then I had second thoughts, since I realized I might run into conflicts with MAC addresses, IP addresses, machine names, etc (probably more I'm just not thinking of).

What do I need to do to minimize conflicts like this? Is there anything beyond MAC address, IP address, and host name which I ought to be worried about? Or can I really just copy the VHDX and spin up a new machine? Is there a better way to do this, while minimizing conflicts between the cloned machines?

EDIT: Any reason for the downvotes? I'm happy to revise or relocate my question if it's poorly constructed or belongs somewhere else.

loneboat
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For Windows guests you'd use Sysprep to generalize the VM that you're using as your template. I don't know if something similar exists for Linux.

As for the MAC address, each cloned VM will have it's own unique MAC address, which is generated by Hyper-V so that shouldn't be an issue.

As for the ip address, if you use DHCP to assign ip addresses then this shouldn't be an issue either.

The only real issue I see is with the hostname.

joeqwerty
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    And Linux does not care about hostname the same way a Windows box will bitch about mutiple machines with the same machinename. Just change/script changing your hosts/hostname file or /etc/sysconfig/network and you should be good as joeqwerty said – TheFiddlerWins Jul 08 '15 at 20:40