This is exactly what VMware Horizon VDI does to create desktop VMs very quickly, called Instant Clone (aka VM Fork), and has been around for several years now.
With that, you don't even need to do deduplication after the fact, it comes for free. When a new VM is forked, it's memory and disk are copy-on-write from the source/parent VM.
With that, you don't even need to do deduplication after the fact, it comes for free. When a new VM is forked, it's memory and disk are copy-on-write from the source/parent VM.