Has anyone tried cloning with DrD?

[likid0]

hy people,

I was triying out the Dynamic root disc, and its a nice piece of sofware.

I know that you should use ignite, for cloning,restoring servers, but i am curius if someone has actualy tried to clone a machine using it ?

or if they are developers thinking on implementing it?

at the moment you cant use it,because you cant change ips, on the restored image,it would be very handy for our BRS, something like and alternate_disk_install in Aix , where you could leave ip,hostname blank on the new cloned image.


anyone?


i will be triying shortly, cloning and booting the machine on a separate vlan ...

[Luk Vandenbussche]

I advise ignite.

Works fine during several years yet to clone HPUX servers

[charlie_bulosan]

Hi,

There's another advantage of a DRD, which are
1) you'd be able to install patches on DRD and be able to postpone the reboot until downtime is scheduled. After patching the DRD, you'd activate it as your normal boot disk. you could easily get back to the previous kernel or state of the system by booting into the old boot disk in other words you don't have to recover from Ignite backup saving you plenty of time.

2) if you've overwritten your previous copy of Ignite backup, this will save you lots of hassle to backed out the changes/patches.


We are still planning to implement this but their is already a good admin guide at docs.hp.com.


Regards,
Charlie

[likid0]

Yes Luk, i allways use ignite, and there is no problem there, works like a charm, i was just thinking that, if in 11v3 hardware paths arent and issue to boot from a different machine, it could be a good way of cloning the systems.


but for now Ignite works perfect

[Roy_48]

I did clone several system with DRD and it's easier then Ignite.
Ignite by the book is only for backup and restore and not for clone (you can clone through ignite but it's not the main objective).
The advantage of DRD is that you can move the DRD disk to safe or to another machine and boot it when ever you want .

[Tim Nelson]

I think both are great.

One disadvantage to the DRD disk swap is that you will have to boot to single user and modify the IP and hostname and any other system specifics e.g. filesystem(s) names/sizes.

With ignite at least you can use interactive installer screen to modify these.

DRD would be faster than running the ignite installer from your make_[net|tape]_recovery if you are not modifying too much.

[Svetoslav Gyurov]

Hi,

Just wanted you to know that there is no need to boot in single user mode to change the personality of the system.

You just mount the clone (drd mount) then edit /var/opt/drd/mnts/sysimage_001/etc/rc.config.d/netconf and you must set HOSTNAME="". This will cause the system to initiate the usage of FIRST-BOOT bundle and user interface will be displayed during boot where the system personality can be set.

Another thing is that you must delete /var/opt/drd/mnts/sysimage_001/var/opt/drd/registry/registry.xml because once you boot the cloned system the disks for which DRD knows are missing and/or probably different.

Regards,
sve