Cloning Windows Servers for Free.

So, I was under some crunch time, and needed an imaging solution. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to any paid solutions, so I had to turn to open source. Now, I don't mind open source, but I rarely use it in big production systems. At any rate, I went ahead and chose one and began using it.

Clonezilla seemed to fit the bill. The two servers that needed to be cloned were both HPs. One was an HP Proliant ML350 G5, and the other was a Proliant DL 380 G4 with no optical drive, both using RAID 1. The RAID part wasn't that big of a concern since the image was going to on a single drive eventually, but the first step was to just get an image.

Originally we were looking for a solution that would allow us to image the servers during productions hours, but since no one had the software to do this, and some other obstacles arose, that idea was scrapped. Just for kicks, what I was planning to do if I was pushed to image the server during production hours was do a live image using DD to a USB drive, probably using Cygwin, or a port of DD for Windows. I would have then probably had to have walked the 3rd party tech how to restore from DD on a blank drive, so I'm kinda happy that didn't happen.

So with Clonezilla, I was going to have to image the servers using two techniques. One using the optical drive, the other using a USB drive. Optical was pretty easy. Just burn the latest STABLE ISO to a blank CD, and boot to it. There were two issues I had. The first being that the video was all garbled like a bad antenna signal when TV broadcasts were analog, I just hit Enter twice to see what would happen. I got to the point where it then asked about keyboard config, how I was going to image, etc. Then it started scanning hardware and loading device drivers. During this time it just stopped for about 2 minutes and kind of worried me (no flashing from optical drive, and I couldn't tell if it was hitting RAM or not, then it continued on). To my joy, it was able to see the data just fine.

Using Clonezilla
1. Choose your deployment method: ISO or USB
2. Go through the menus
3. Select the item that says Image
4. Select /dev for partimage
5. THEN plug in your USB device, wait a couple of seconds, and hit ENTER
6. Let it run and you'll have a clone to a image when all is done.

Using Clonezilla on USB
1. Go to here and follow directions: http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/liveusb.php
2. Ensure your server can boot from USB, AND has it chosen to boot from before hitting the disks.
3. Follow steps 2-6 above.

http://clonezilla.org/