On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Kevin McConnell wrote: > > --- Riku Meskanen <mesrik@cc.jyu.fi> wrote: > > > Those of you who haven't had opportunity to > > experience HP-UX > > features of host cloning, > > I guess you've never heard of VMware.... which > supports host cloning under linux in a few seconds. > Nope, you guessed wrong, I haven't been living in complete darkness either :) I've had VMware since Jun 21 1999 and gone trough all releases up to 3.0.0 currently with my laptop. I'm quite familiar that vmware has also server products, not just workstation version, I've followed multiple projects like from virtuozzo http://www.sw-soft.com/, virtual private servers http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/miscprj/s_context.hc etc or anything you can think that mainstream Linux sites or slashdot, etc. has published. I happened to jump Linux bandwagon -92 (since first working support of SCSI (AHA1542) appeared around .096-0.97) and been around with many *nix, mini, pc technologies than vast majority even haven't heard of. Built first LAN on -84 an so on ;) Virtual servers, blade servers etc. will have their uses, but until they will make their way in great numbers to production servers I would not hold my breath that they solve all your backup problems. One of the important tricks the server virtualization does not help a single bit is the capability of Mondo and Ignite to rearrange or switch partition sizes, switch over to LVM, convert to sofware RAID, or change to a diferent filesystem. Remember that the bare metal backupsystems (Ignite, Mondo) do not just copy back filesystem or partition, they are rebuild and configure filesystems and most important configuration files too. Mondo has also support for taking binary copy of a unsupported filesystem or possibly even raw partition (didn't test it, but hey why shouldn't it work if it uses same tricks with NTFS). Let me tell you a true story. If you have several servers thousands of kilometers away, accross the country, and either you have someone even pc-user at the site you can instruct him/her to insert with bootable recovery media and ask rebooting that darn server. Just make you give proper details of the rack and bay and read identification label not to accidentally reboot wrong host, oh well... seen that too :/ You can come back even if you don't have complete lights-out management with service processors etc. I've done that couple of times once I worked for one of the worlds largest telecoms systems vendors (Lucent) and the Ignite was our saviour few times you had two options fly or drive as hell driven 1200km, to recover the system or just pick up the phone and ask basically any installer, datacom or datanetwork technician to give you a hand with few simple operations any reasonble human being can accomplish without special training. It's worth keeping the recovery simple, you and your boss both sleep much better. HTH, :-) riku -- [ This .signature intentionally left blank ]
