Clone nodes and change fields with Rules and VBO
I solved using custom PHP code in my component instead of the node clone action, so I'd like to share this with you:

// load the original node
$node = node_load($node_parameter-&gt;nid);
$node-&gt;nid = null;
$node-&gt;vid = null;
// park the new node
node_object_prepare($node);
// reset fields
$node-&gt;uid = 1;
$node-&gt;status = 1;
$node-&gt;path = null;
$node-&gt;created = 1432072800;
$node-&gt;title = $site-&gt;current_date;
$node-&gt;field_one['und'][0]['target_id']= 11530;
$node-&gt;field_two['und'][0]['value']= 'my text';
unset($node-&gt;field_three);
// save the new node
node_save($node);
// flush
unset($node);  


Probably the key is that when you use the action "node clone", Rules alone can't determine the cloned node type and access to its fields directly, even if you are cloning a node already verified by the condition at the beginning of the component. Probably it could if putting another condition after the clone action, but I don't know how to.

So another solution I tried is to create a component that just clones the VBO passed node. And then create a separated rule that reacts on event "after cloning a node" and put in there the condition "content is type of" and all the "set data value" actions I needed.

And it works.

Anyway I prefer the first solution, so I can keep all I need in just one place and avoid using Node Clone module. I was worried about performance executing PHP and node_load() in Rules, but in just few minutes I successfully cloned and updated 2260 nodes.

Thanx all