topic Re: Clone RAID 5 machine in Operating System - Linux

Clone RAID 5 machine

'chris' — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:32:35 GMT

hi

howto clone linux with RAID 5 on other machine with the same hardware ?
can use one HD from the running system to clone on other machine ?

kind regards
chris

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

'chris' — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:47:47 GMT

our problem is, we cannot cannot switch off the server and boot using any bootable device.

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

Uwe Zessin — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:21:08 GMT

No, you cannot pull out a single disk drive from a RAID-5 set and use it for replication. The disk drive contains only a fraction of the data and parity information.
If you cannot shutdown the server, the only way to copy the data is from within the operating system (kind of 'online' backup). If you're very lucky, the system is running with LVM setup and even has space left to do snapshots.

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

'chris' — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:25:30 GMT

It wasn't LVM setuped on the running system.

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

Vitaly Karasik_1 — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:35:01 GMT

do you use software or hardware RAID?

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

'chris' — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:24:32 GMT

It's hardware RAID

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon)

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

Vitaly Karasik_1 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:37:38 GMT

so you should
1) build RAID5 on the new box using RAID utility you get with your server or RAID BIOS interface.
In fact, I guess, you have a few RAID volumes.

2) create linux partitions and clone your data from old machine. You can do it in a few ways - using plain tar, dd, ... or some Ghost-like software, for example http://www.mondorescue.org

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:02:42 GMT

Shalom,

Lots of options.

A good pay for option is acronis

http://www.acronis.com

It can even deal with different hardware where mondo sometimes gets stuck.

SEP

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

~sesh — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:07:44 GMT

Another commercial software, guess which?(from HP).. Rapid Deployment Pack!

You can use this to capture the image of your source server and deploy on to the target server. I guess its worth checking out as well. It would be better for larger scale deployments too.

Re: Clone RAID 5 machine

~sesh — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:08:54 GMT

You can find a lot more info about it here:
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/rdp/services.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN