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Duplicating a physical drive

Z

Zerosum

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 9, 2010
Messages
216
Is it possible to 'clone/ghost' an entire esxi drive?

I have a fully working ESXI box with multiple VMs on it at home. The hardware is almost entirely esxi server grade/HCL approved. What happened is I originally just wanted a small 'boot' system drive for esxi and the very limited VMs I was going to run at home on it.

Well, would you believe that the system is running so well, that the number of VMs on it has grown by quite a bit. And that small boot drive (only 160gb) is feeling incredibly tiny now. So what I wanted to do is basically get another larger, ~500gb drive and basically replace the 160 with it. Is it possible to do that without actually reinstalling? And if not, how would the best way of doing this be?

I have other hardware including a nearly identical esxi box (minus slower cpu and ram). Unfortunately I'm not familiar with HA. Not even sure if it's even offered in the free esxi I'm using. I know I'm not doing things the exactly proper way. This is for a home use and I was learning. If I had to do it over, I would put the VM datastores on a networked (iSCSI) drive instead of on the physical drive as it is now. So now, I do with that decision from over 2 years ago.

Is there anyone who maybe able to offer some help/advice on what I can do? Nothing is really mission critical (as it is for my home use) but naturally I rather not have to lose anything. Downtime isn't a huge deal while I'm looking for a solution. I can provide whatever additional info is needed.
 
Why not do

Add second drive...
Within ESXi add it as a Datastore...

move some VM's from 160g to new drive..

then you have 2 x Data Stores and more space to play with.
 
Not sure if you can get access to this software, but I use Hiren's boot CD and Symantec Ghost 11 to clone drives all the time - even from smaller drives to bigger drives.

You'll need an external drive or a networked share to do it.

1. Boot Hiren's Mini win XP (Win PE environment)
2. load up external with Ghost 11
3. open ghost and clone entire disk, no compression onto external
4. after its finished, shut down and install new disk.
5. boot back up into minixp and clone onto the new disk.

Alternatively if you can hook up the esxi harddrive to another computer (through USB) and then you can clone it from there. Eject old drive, then attach the new drive, and clone it back.

If it somehow doesn't work for you, you can do what Stanza33 said and just add it as extra storage ad move VM's off.

And what holden said is right too. Cloning copies all the sectors of the harddrive as if it were an actually harddrive. Cloning it back onto another drive preserves all the shit that made it hurt to begin with, boot sectors, mbr, and all the system files.

Anyway, hope this helps.
 
Stanza33 said:
Add second drive...
Click to expand...

It's a physical issue. I only have physical room for one system drive. All the physical bays are already allocated to my NAS, which was my original purpose to have this box. A home file server.

I haven't used ghosting software for a while. Do they clone fine going from smaller to larger hard drive? Like I said, I haven't had to clone any modern OS but if that works, I'll give that a try.

I'm trying to follow d4nnn's instructions. Boot mini XP, load ghost on another drive. Ghost drive. Why boot back up into ini xp and clone onto a new disk if you already ghosted and clone an entire disk?
 
If you can do that in one go then it'll be fine as it'll clone the current drive onto the new drive.

The way I do it, I create a cloned file (in this case a .gho file) and then i can use that as my master copy and then clone it onto a newer drive later. You won't need to shut down/reboot if you put in the new drive in the first boot up. I've had issues with raided drives, but its ok once you load up the proper drivers for them.

And as far as I can tell, I have not had an issue with cloning from different sized drives.

You can also use something like symantec backup exec or norton ghost 15 and create a full C:\ drive clone partition in windows. Create a bootable symantec/norton ghost CD and boot into that, then point the CD boot to the backup area to restore on the new harddrive.
 
Good luck ghosting vmfs.

dd if=/vmfs/devices/disks/source of=/vmfs/devices/disks/destination bs=1M

Hit enter, go get some sleep. Resig destination when done.
 
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