Question

Live Cloning VM drives to another VM

  • 3 July 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 5329 views
J

Hi everybody we are just in the beginning of the process of migrating our environment from VMWare to AHV.

One of the scenarios that we need to consider for one of our application sets involves cloning an entire drive from a build server to a reporting server.

Essentially right now I have a server that takes data and compiles it into a finished product on an intermittent basis.  When the server completes it’s build it calls another script that clones the drive to a reporting server.  Our reporting server has duplicate drives 1 online and 1 offline, the script overwrites the offline drive, then gets the drives to swap online state so that our clients are now reporting on the newly refreshed data.

I am looking to replicate this concept and am hoping for a few pointers.

In our existing environment I am making use of some of the storage commands for the disk clone.  I am hoping to understand how to replicate the disk clone from an AHV hosted Windows server.

Would anybody have any suggestions on where I might be able to start with this?

Thanks all!

2 replies

HITESH0801
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Hey @Jb. 

You need to play around a little with AHV disk management workflows. From what I understood you need to clone a disk and then move it from one VM to another. 

The following KB lists some commonly used AHV Disk management workflow, might come in handy. 

AHV Disk Management Workflow 

 

Hope this helps !
J

@HITESH0801 thank you for this I agree this will come in handy, and yes you understood correctly we want to clone a disk and move it to another VM.

While I have your attention (and I apologize for asking what are probably exceedingly basic questions) however I have a few questions if I may.

In each instance from what I see it would appear that the source VM is being powered off to allow for the disk Image to be created - is that a mandatory requirement?  We were actually hoping to use either PowerShell or the API to initiate a drive clone from the source machine after the job has completed - this is what we do now as this allows us to automate the entire process including specifying the correct disk to clone from the job itself.

Secondly is it possible once the disk image has completed and been stored in the Image Configuration to ‘overwrite’ the existing Target Disk of the second VM or would it be necessary to create a net new drive each time?

Thanks for your time and assistance in getting me pointed in the right direction.

Jb.

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