[CentOS] Best way to duplicate a live Centos 5 server?

Emmanuel Noobadmin centos.admin at gmail.com
Tue Jul 10 11:45:49 UTC 2012


On 7/10/12, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
> IF you're using LVM, you can take a file system snapshot, and dump the
> snapshot, however, as this is a point-in-time replica of the file system.

Unfortunately I wasn't.

It does seem that essentially all the better methods that minimize
downtime require the system to be prepped when first installed, be it
LVM/MD/DRBD.

So going ahead, I'm basically making it a point to use MD mirror on
all new installs, including VMs that are not running RAID 1 virtually
as the physical storage is already RAIDed.

The assumption is that I should be able to just add an iSCSI target as
a member of the degraded RAID mirror, wait for it to sync, then
shutdown and start the new server within minutes as opposed to waiting
a couple of hours for rsync or any other forms of imaging/dump to
backup the current state.

The added benefit of this approach, it would seem is that I could use
that same approach to do backup of the entire fs.



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