Questions[cloning](server)

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 management and provisioning extremely compelling features. The high availability and DR stuff are far less important.

We often have to install our applications on a machine we had only some influence in picking, so the hardware can vary a good bit. This time the vendor is HP, the next time it may be Dell. Blade servers or not, etc. The application is complex to install, involving several (up to 30) machines sometimes. It is so nice being able to install the base hypervisor, copy a few files, and be up and running. It saves us an enormous amount of time.

Running on VMs also has its disvantages too. It is one more layer of stuff to work with. Admins may not be familiar with them. VMware's licensing model seems to punish companies with lots of servers, but only one or two VMs per server (very expensive just for management tool). Often the hypervisor puts limitations on the VMs that really matter to our application. Hyper-V's limit of 4 CPU cores leaps to mind as really annoying to us since our application will use any CPU power you give it. That ease of provisioning almost always wins out though, since we are a development shop and are constantly building and rebuilding servers for ourselves and customers.

So my general question is: if you have at least some power over picking your hardware and are working with Windows-based OSes, what should you do to be able to rubber-stamp out similar machines without resorting to virtualization with the least pain possible? Additional points for solutions that allow migrating to a different hardware configuration with minimal pain. Or is this just asking too much and should we keep going with VMs?

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 files:

VBoxManage clonevdi /mnt/md1/original/root-fs.vdi /mnt/md1/cloned/root-fs.vdi

(Taken from http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=853#p858 )

Edit: this does not seem to work for VDI files that are already part of ~/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml, I get an error message:

ERROR: Cannot register the hard disk '/mnt/md1/original/root-fs.vdi' with UUID {96a1462b-c30a-4911-a954-d9093122f083} because a hard disk '/mnt/md1/original/root-fs.vdi' with UUID {96a1462b-c30a-4911-a954-d9093122f083} already exists in the media registry ('/home/mit/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml')

I would have to create a new VM afterwards and use the cloned virtual disk containers.

Is it also possible to clone a VM by copying the virtual disk contianer files and the config files using filesystem commands and do the rest by hand?

I'd have to manually edit the ~/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml and insert a new disk and a new machine:

Can I just make up UUIDs or how would this work?

I would very much prefer this hardcore method of doing things as it allows me to freely and rapdily backup, restore, move or clone machines. Or ist there a better way to do this?

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.

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 or whatever.

What's the best way to go about this?

slave:~# mount
/dev/md0 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
procbususb on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)

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 recommend for disk cloning and image-based backup.

There are several OSS products, but it isn't entirely clear how well they support NTFS.

I am not really to just get a list of cloning. Instead, I would like to know what tool you use, why you choose that tool, and what you use it for.

After reading the answers I have a followup question. Given the tool you suggest, is it possible, and how easy is it to extract a particular file from the image without having to restore the entire image?