Server Fault Stack Exchange
Server Fault Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [cloning]

Creating an almost identical copy, for example of a computer installation or a hard disk.

The process of creating one ore more almost identical copies of a single ancestor.

Cloning may refer to creating copies of datastores, like hard disks, but also of a physical computer installation or a virtual machine installation, including operating system, installed software and stored data.

76 questions
22
votes
3 answers

Cloning Virtual Machine On Azure, keeping existing

There doesn't seem to be a straight answer online about this. I have an existing Virtual Machine on Azure and I want to clone it to another region in case my existing server goes down. It needs to be the exact replica but all I can find are moving…
exposure
  • 273
  • 1
  • 5
  • 10
9
votes
15 answers

What is your recommended disk cloning tool?

Symantec Ghost used to be the tool to use, but from what I read, you no longer get a cli-client, unless you are willing to buy the Ghost Solution Suite at least 5 licenses and have another service running on a server somewhere. So what tool do you…
Zoredache
  • 128,755
  • 40
  • 271
  • 413
6
votes
2 answers

Scripted install vs cloning

What are the downside of cloning vs scripted installation (using Kick-start / Puppet)? I read a lot of pro-scripted install opinion, where cloning is considered as unreliable method due to ever changing hardware. In my case the hardware is pretty…
SyRenity
  • 3,159
  • 11
  • 55
  • 79
5
votes
2 answers

any issues with file-copy Git Repo to another machine (and keep working from both)?

I want to copy all my git repos from my old machine to my new machine (both Ubuntu). I will keep using both machines... I am doing this primarily out of laziness (well: there are for some local branches at the moment, and convenient stashes at hand,…
Frank Nocke
  • 590
  • 8
  • 18
5
votes
3 answers

How can I uprade my software RAID1 set of drives?

I've got two 600GB drives in a software RAID1 setup on a physical Debian server. I want to be able to upgrade the capacity of the server by cloning the drives to a matching pair of 2TB drives. I can then wipe the 600GB drives and use them as storage…
Gareth
  • 8,413
  • 13
  • 43
  • 44
5
votes
4 answers

Cloning LVM partitions

I need to clone a CentOS installation from a 1TB disk partitioned with LVM, to several identical machines. The disk is mostly empty since only the operating system and some software are installed and configured. Without LVM I would copy the entire…
Manuel
  • 61
  • 1
  • 1
  • 5
5
votes
0 answers

How to clone the OS disk and keep both disks plugged in?

Here's the situation: A Windows RAID 1 has partially failed. The broken disk was replaced with a new disk. The old two disks do not have Advanced Format (bigger sector size). The new replacement disk does have it. Windows refuses to add the new disk…
boot4life
  • 269
  • 2
  • 5
  • 12
5
votes
3 answers

What options do I have to clone a physical server as easily as a virtual machine?

We use virtual machines a great deal at my company, Hyper-V mainly but we have also dabbled with ESXi plus vCenter. Besides the traditional advantage of being able to consolidate many physical machines onto one server, we find the ease of…
Jeremy
  • 641
  • 3
  • 11
  • 16
5
votes
2 answers

Move and clone VirtualBox machines with filesystem commands

I know of 2 ways to clone a VirtualBox machine on a linux host, one is by using the VirtualBox gui and exporting and re-importing as appliance (in the file menu of VirtualBox). The other is by cloning only the virtual disk container…
mit
  • 1,844
  • 6
  • 29
  • 42
5
votes
3 answers

Quick and clean ways to clone virtual machines

I have 2 hypervisors running. One is an ESXi 4, the other one a Hyper-V 2008 R2. My question is: What is the cleanest and easiest way to clone a machine under each hypervisor without using any centralized management tool. Thanks.
Alexandre Nizoux
  • 498
  • 1
  • 4
  • 15
4
votes
0 answers

Raid 1 seeding to speed up identical installs

I was thinking of installing Ubuntu on one of our Dell servers in a RAID 1 configuration, then using the mirrored drive as the primary drive in a second identical server with another RAID 1 setup. Essentially installing the OS once and using the…
TestTech
  • 41
  • 1
4
votes
3 answers

Cloning a guest KVM instance with with a new IP address

I had an Ubuntu 10.4 VM running on another Ubuntu KVM host. I'd like to clone this VM but with a new IP address? I know that I would have to stop my VM, clone it, somehow give it a new IP address and then start both. How can I do so without having…
Mridang Agarwalla
  • 307
  • 2
  • 6
  • 15
4
votes
5 answers

Best Server Ghost-Like Tool For Windows

I'm looking for advice on which tool we should use to clone servers. In the short term, we will be cloning identical hardware but in the long run we may want to create one image and replicate that on a different class of machine. For example, as…
John Dibling
  • 253
  • 3
  • 10
4
votes
2 answers

How is TRIM handled when cloning a disk with dd?

The TRIM command allows an OS to inform an SSD which sectors contain data, and which are free. This allows the disk to re-use free sectors internally and improves wear leveling. Now, if an SSD is cloned to anoher via dd, each single sector is copied…
sweber
  • 141
  • 1
3
votes
4 answers

How to clone pfsense 2.0 (FreeBSD) server for backup?

I'd like to routinely clone my live pfSense 2.0 server for backup purposes. I am a FreeBSD n00b. What I'm doing now: 1. Manually install pfSense to an identical hardware 2. Backup config file from live machine 3. Restore config file to backup…
A.B. User
  • 245
  • 1
  • 4
  • 8
1
2 3 4 5 6