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sglee

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Image Copy of Hard Drive

Hi,
 
 I have two identical servers that I need to duplicate, if possible.
 One server, aka primary server, has 4 hard drives in LSI MegaRaid in RAID 1 and two as hot spares.
 The primary serverhas CentOS 7 loaded and Progress database system with data. Users and printer information ... etc - typical run of the mill server stuff. The secondady, aka backup server, also has 4 hard drives in LSI MegaRaid in RAID 1 and two as hot spares.
 What is the easiest way to duplicate the image of primary server on the backup server (other than creating users, printers, install Progress database ... duplicating same effort)?

Thanks.
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rindi
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sglee

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Are you suggesting Clonezilla live?
You boot the server from either a CloneZilla CD, or USB stick, or if your server is a newer model it may also be able to boot directly to the iso file.
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Since you have perhaps done this (CloneZilla ) and I have not ...
Can you outline the steps involved?
Is it like booting both primary and backup serves using (I am going to use) CloneZilla CD, boot from it.
On primary server screen, there will be some type of menus as far as entering the destination (backup) server IP address(or hostname) and initiate duplication job?
You boot from the CD, then you get a simple menu where you select what you want to do, for example create an image or clone, or restore an image, if you want an image it then asks where you want the image to be saved (I usually use a USB disk), it then mounts that destination. Then it asks you what your source is, you select it, then it starts the image.

When done, you boot the other server from that CD, attach the USB disk, then do the restore...
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So it is not LIVE real-time image transfer/duplication between two servers ..
I need to save the whole image of the primary server on an external USB Drive connected to the primary server first.
Then boot the backup server from  CloneZilla CD and basically choose "Restore Image" option from the menu?
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Would you be kind enough to post the download link of necessary file(s)?
Correct. The link I posted in my first comment will also be goof for the download. You can then also  try it out on another PC, so you can check the options you have etc.
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On download page, I see the following. Does it matter which one I download?
(1) alternative stable - 20161121-yakkety
(2) stable - 2.5.0-5      
(3) alternative testing - 20170103-zesty -20170103-yakkety
(4) testing - 2.5.0-16
If you aren't sure, go for stable. Testing usually works fine too. So basically it doesn't matter that much.
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OK. I will try it this evening using test machine. In fact I have a HP server where I installed CentOS 7 for tesing and I will try to duplicate that on another PC.
Does it matter if 2nd computer has different CPU, RAM, HD size and no RAID?
The disk size can matter, particularly if the new size is smaller than the original one. RAID or not shouldn't matter, but it depends a little on the age of the controller. If you are using a very new controller, it is possible that the kernel won't recognize it yet. But Linux is generally very good with the hardware and it will normally recognize most of it out of the box.
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It worked great and I have a couple of questions:
But let me explain what I did.
I burned CloneZilla onto a CD. After connecting an external USB HD to primary server, I started it from CloneZilla CD. Selected the external USB HD as image destination. All went well.  For restoration of image, I grabbed an used PC, installed 1TB internal HD (that probably had Windows 7 or XP OS) as a primary HD and started the computer from  CloneZilla CD. When I chose 1TB internal HD as destination for restore of image, it failed to restore. So I had to erase existing partitions/volume off 1TB HD. I retried to restore the image and it worked well then

In production environment, after saving the  image from primary server,
 
(1) Is it necessary to delete any existing volume on secondary server before I attempt to restore the primary server image?
(2) Could I have used one big USB flash drive (like 64GB) and made it a bootable flash drive for CloneZilla AND store the image of primary server? The primary server image would be less than 20GB.
If the partitions on the destination disk are the same size or larger, you don't need to delete them. But generally it is better to do so.

I haven't tried putting the image onto the same media CloneZilla runs from. If CloneZilla sees the USB stick as a possible destination, it should work. If not, it may need some hands on.
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Thank you for your help!