Physical Copy of One Hard Drive to Another

[abiagioc]

I need to make a physical copy of a VMware 6.7 hard drive to another Physical disk for Configuration Management and Software Development purposes. My physical disk is a 1TB Spinning SAS disk and the target is the same. I tried DD, and also Clonezilla. Vmware boots up fine, but the instances (in this case Red Hat 7) all come up as invalid. I have searched far and wide and found no one that is even attempting this. Is the system that hard to backup and restore? Thank You for your time reading and responding. It is appreciated. Tony

[scott28tt]

@abiagioc 

Is this a one-off thing or something you will need to do on a regular basis?

Where is the source drive physically relative to the destination drive?

(Wondering if a backup or replication method might be best, but that would depend on things such as these)

[abiagioc]

Scott, thanks for the reply. More of a regular basis. I usually bring the system down and boot it with a Linux Live CD.

Then put both the source and target in the system. Then from a terminal use the DD command.

I sometimes boot a Clonezilla live CD and do the same clone operation, or Disk to image on a USB drive then restore.

Usually that works, and has for VMware 5 and RHEL 5 instances.

Now we have a Vmware 6.7 with RHEL 7 instances and these methods yield the invalid VMs when we boot the Copy.

We would take the USB drive with the image, or the Copied drive and store it for Config Management.

[continuum]

Hi
please try to use the slang that we all use here - I assume you mean VMs when you talk about instances ?
What you experience is expected behaviour.
Your vmfs-volume is detected as a snapshot and so the paths to the vmx-files no longer match the entries in /etc/vmware/hostd/vmInventory.xml

Ulli

[abiagioc]

Thank you Ulli!

Got it it VMs of course. 

So I take it there is a way to manually fix the paths in the VMinventory file.

I have read something in other posts about the command esxcli storage filesystem list, and mount commands.

I am no expert regarding Vmware (obviously) just a software engineer from a previous era...when mainframes existed and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

[continuum]

Case A: - the vmfs-volume in the cloned system is mounted and the VMs are listed in datastorebrowser

- remove all stale entries in the GUI with "remove from inventory"
- register all VMs again

Case B: - the vmfs-volume in the cloned system is NOT mounted

- remove all stale entries in the GUI with "remove from inventory"
- https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1011387
- register all VMs again

[abiagioc]

Again, thank you very much for your time and informative response.

I will go try this.

Tony