Cloning ESXi server

[b1izzard]

I have a single 60GB hard drive that I would like to replace with a 500GB. Has anyone been successful in cloning this? If so, what method did you use?

[r_lam]

Why do you want to clone ESXi, a reinstall of ESXi will take about 10 minutes?

[jheppner]

Why would you want to clone ESXi? Not much there to clone.

We are running ESXi on USB keys, you might want to just do that and use all internal storage for VMs

[mpverr]

If you MUST do it, try Ghost from Symantec. But has the other two gents cited, you really shouldn't waste time on it - reinstall is the best methodology.

[b1izzard]

What I meant is the entire disk including the datastores since everything is on one disk. Perhaps I just need to install ESXi on the new disk and copy over the VM's to the new disk. If you attach a secondary SATA drive, will the old ESXi disk normally detect this so you can copy the datastore over to it?

[J1mbo]

As others have said the USB install route is by far the neatest.

Anyway - add your new disk as channel 0, install either to USB or that, create a datastore on new disk and add the existing datastore. Copy VMs using the datastore browser. Add the VMs on the new disk by right-clicking on vmx and "add to inventory". Note when starting the copied VMs for the first time you need to answer a question, whether it's been moved or copied. Take your pick in this scenario, it doesn't make a difference

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[savantsingh]

Backup the vmfs datastore. 60 GB so i am assuming there are not many VM's to backup. There are many ways to do that if you want cheap and simple just copy the vms elsewhere using winscp or fastscp...

Now this is when i assume that you can't add the 600 GB drive(s) to the server with the 60 GB -- I am not sure why but lets assume that..

Build the ESXi again i would like to suggest to boot the ESXi with USB and use the 600 GB for storing ur VMs. Copy your VMs to the new datastore and re-register them..

Hope this helps!!

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[b1izzard]

I will try adding the new drive to channel 0, the old to channel 1, install ESXi on the new drive, and copy over the datastores as mentioned. Sounds good to me. Just curious if there is any performance degradation running off a USB key? Understandably the datastores are on the hard drive, so it is mostly just the management overhead for the USB.

[r_lam]

No, there's not an performance degradation if you run it of a USB key.

[J1mbo]

To be safe, I would discconect the current drive completely until ESX is completely up-and-running from the new drive.

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