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doggy
Contributor
Contributor

Using the Equallogic SAN to create clones of VMs

Hi,

Probably through impatience more than anything I'm trying get cloning our first VM asap. I dont yet have a VC server nor SQL server installed - I plan on putting both those services onto cloned VMs.

I've built the first VM and now want to clone it. I've done the following:

Sysprep'd the VM

Taken a snapshot of the LUN using the SAN's management interface (Equallogic)

Used the SAN to clone that snapshot to a new LUN (again using Equallogic's UI)

The plan is to then connect ESX (3.01) to that new LUN and start up the clone.

I feel there's going to be some issues there, so before going ahead I thought I'd put it past y'all. I guess there'll be issues with the VMs filenames? Any other issues you can forsee?

Much thanks

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woharrow
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

the question I have is, How do you have the VM Drive attached? e.g. is this an RDM to the VM where you have the volume itself formatted with NTFS.

-or-

Is this a VMDK sitting inside a VMFS datastore on the ESX server?

Both can be done, you are off to a great start. However, you may have to do different things depending on which method you are using.

Thanks

Wade

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doggy
Contributor
Contributor

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply.

The VM I want to clone is on its own VMFS volume on the SAN..

d

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