Live cloning with VC

[Speedbmp]

has anybody done live cloning? if so what does it do to the system being cloned? does it take a snapshot? does it effect the original in anyway?

can you live clone SQL and Exchange?

what about live cloneing of AD?

Stephen

[Kevin_Gao]

The clone doesn't have anything to do with the original. It's not like a snapshot where if the snapshot is deleted - the delta change log is merged back into the original. The cloned / original VM live separate lives.

I think cloning is good if you want to duplicate a VM and then run tests on the clone while leaving the original alone. Great for testing patches and things.

Aside for testing I don't see the benefit of cloning your DC's or your Exchange server in a production environment. I mean you can never turn them back on (at least not on the same network as your production).

[Speedbmp]

i have had a bad experience with snapshots

i did an exchange 2000 to 2003 upgrade and took snapshots before and after. anyway after i did the upgrade everything was great until i deleted the snapshots. and i ended up loosing my exchange it was a live deleting of the snapshots and i think that is where the problem lied.(never again will i take or delete snapshots when the VM running)

So anyway because the live cloning does not touch the original VM i can do live cloning on them to say make a test environment? because right now i have one but it was done with cold cloning of my VM's, that and right now but it is about 4 months out of date from my production environment.

Stephen

[Kevin_Gao · Accepted solution]

Yes cloning doesn't change the original VM. I think it's 1 of the easiest ways to create a test environment.

Sorry to hear about your snapshot experience. snapshots work something like this:

1) you take a snapshot and vm starts a delta file of all the changes (original vm stops changing)

2) you start making changes to the vm but all the changes are in fact made only to the delta file (snapshot file)

3) when you delete your snapshot...in effect all it does is takes the delta file and merges all those changes back into your original VM.

the trouble (confusion) comes when you have multiple nested vm's. heck I had a similar experience when I made multiple snapshots and deleted one of the middle snapshots. I consequently lost some of the latter changes that I made. thankfully it wasn't an important VM. live and learn!

[headshox]

I have created a step by step tutorial on Live Clone's. I definately have had a lot of troubble with this in the past.

I hope it helps!

[rabrackett]

Hey speedbmp, you mentioned installing Java on a V50L in another post, where did you get the howto on that? I'm in the same boat with the V50L and VMWARE View. I can't get the terminal to connect to the broker and it's not on VMWARE's supported list yet.

Richard

[eamoo]

Hey Headshox, thanks for posting all your hard work for us but the link you gave is not working, its says page cannot be displayed, has it been

removed...?

[eamoo]

Need to clone a live environment, just one vm machine but as far as am aware you can't clone a live vm unless you power it off, please show me or if you can lead me down the right path, how to accomplish cloning a live vm machine.....thanks

[munishpalmakhij]

My First Question would be which version are you using.

You should be able to do Live Cloning when the VM is Powered On. You don't need to Power Off the VM.

If that was the case it shouldnt be called Live Cloning