Start replication with clones?

I want to improve availability of an application by distributing it to two nodes and enabling mariadb replication. I am wondering whether I can configure the existing db to use binary log, then shutdown and clone the entire system, and afterwards enable replication (symetric) instead of setting up an empty system, export and import as suggested e.g. in https://unixcop.com/master_master-replication-mariadb/.

Thanks,

Joachim