Yes,
in Finder, each additional copy of the .macvm reports taking the full amount of space.
However, examining the drive's storage usage (under System Information) , I see that the amount of drive space available doesn't immediately go down after copies.
The previous comment by
@MatthewR20 "You can duplicate the entire .macvm in finder and because of APFS it will not take up any additional space." implies that somehow macOS is able to avoid taking up the space due to the files being identical, at least until we start making changes to one or the other. I
I'm not a Mac expert, but I just found this article, which explains that initially, since the files are identical, they are linked, with the second one not taking up any new space, even though Finder reports it as another 68 gigs:
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/14...one files ('copy on,same data as the original.
As you boot and modify the second VM, apparently APFS will unlink the files, so that storage usage by the second one will grow. You could copy a vm, note the storage available, start the VM, make some big changes, and see if the storage available jumps now that the two VM files aren't identical. I haven't done that test.
Each Ventura VM image that Parallels initially created (by downloading) started out being 68 gigs. If you create the VMs using the command line rather than their UI, you can control how big they initiall are. The command line instructions looked like too much work for a naive user like me, so I didn't try them. I didn't know how small I could shrink the VM image size before making it unusable (would depend on your usage goals anyway.) But, since all unused space is apparently linked back to the initial VM from which you copy them, there's not much value (IMO) since they don't use a lot of space until you make changes to one or the other VMs.
On my 250 gig M1 (which is almost barebones) I have 118 gigs free with one VM. So, if I make a lot of changes to one of the VM files that I cloned, eventually it'll probably chew up the remaining space. But, for normal app testing, I don't think I'll be changing more than a few gigs on each VM, so hopefully they won't grow too quickly as they get unlinked and actually start using their own disk space.
By the way, I'm not running the latest version of Parallels on Sonoma and am able to boot a Ventura VM in Parallels. I had read that the host and VM OS versions had to be identical...
