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

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 2:32 AM, Emmanuel Noobadmin
<centos.admin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/12, Smithies, Russell <Russell.Smithies at agresearch.co.nz> wrote:
>> How about using one of the backup tools to image the server?
>> We use Symantec System Recovery and image all the disks. We then have the
>> option of restoring to different hardware (physical or virtual) which works
>> very well.
>> There's a 60-day evaluation period.
>> http://www.symantec.com/products/trialware.jsp?pcid=pcat_business_cont&pvid=1602_1
>
> Not an option for me unfortunately, the only Windows systems on
> location are at best Win7 Home Premium and SSR requires a Win Server
> OS according to their page.

Clonezilla-live is good for straight image copies, but you have to
shut down the source while taking the copy and it doesn't do raid.  It
does handle most filesystems including windows and knows enough to
only copy the used blocks.

ReaR will make the copy with the source running and handles most linux
disk layouts.   There is not much documentation at this point and
there are a lot of options, but if you have an NFS share to hold the
intermediate backup copy it only takes a couple of lines in a conf
file to set it up.   However, since it is designed for backup/restore,
the default is for the restore iso to use the same IP as the source
which is awkward for live cloning.   You can work around that but
should probably try a test system first.  It is definitely worth
looking at as a simple backup solution in any case.  If the target
hardware is different, both clonezilla and rear may require you to
build a new initrd with appropriate disk drivers included.

Using the VMware converter tool (free) might work.  I've done it with
windows, but so far it has not worked with the disk layouts on the
linux systems I have tried.  When it works, it works very well - and
you could probably do additional conversions from the vmware image.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com