Patent ID: 8566821

Claim:
A method for creating a thin clone of a base virtual machine (VM), comprising: identifying a snapshot of a base VM, the snapshot comprising metadata identifying a storage location for VM data of the base VM, the snapshot comprising a deduplicated copy of the base VM, the snapshot comprising a point-in-time representation of the storage location; creating a thin clone of the base VM based upon the metadata, the creating comprising refraining from copying the VM data of the base VM to the thin clone, the creating comprising storing a reference within the thin clone in place of storing a copy of the VM data within the thin clone, the reference pointing to the storage location for the VM data; and distinguishing the thin clone from the base VM, the distinguishing comprising: remotely accessing a hypervisor environment; issuing a query command, through the hypervisor environment, to access a VM parameter for the thin clone; and modifying the VM parameter.