Move SLES Image to Unlike Hardware - Cloning
 

Folks,

We have a SLES 9.3 workstation/desktop image that we fine toned for our needs. We have been running it on about 100 desktops we leased from Microway, Inc. some three years ago They are mostly single core Opteron systems with SATA drives and 4 or more GB of memory.

Now, it is time to end that lease and start a new one. We need to move that SLES 9.3 image to a dual-core Opteron workstation with SAS drives, etc. and upgrade it to SLES 10.1

The guy on our team who is doing this said he had to pitch the present image and start from scratch with a vanilla SLES 10.1 install because the Acronis tool he uses only lets him install images on like hardware.

I know there has to be a tool that will allow us to take an image off a single core Opteron and place it on a dual-core Opteron even if the hard drives have changed from SATA to SAS. Can anyone give me some clues, suggestions?

By the way, we are testing new hardware from various vendors, including HP, Sun and Dell. So this is a vendor change too.

Thanks,

I can only say that I feel that this is the wrong thing to do.

Maybe I don't fully understand your problem, but it seems to me that if you are not going for exactly the same system -you say:
Why not do a clean install and then bring in your own data from backup? (You do, of course have good backups, don't you? And I'd advise an extra one in these circumstances, just to be sure.) And be sure that you have all your .conf files available which may not be under /home. What with software upgrades and changes in configration directives, your existing .confs may not be the ideal thing to use, but you should ensure that you have a safe copy of all of the important ones for reference.

And you can probably use autoyast to simplify the configuration process (although don't ask me how exactly you use it - I've prepared autoyast files but never used them).

Salasi, I appreciate your reply. The situation is the SLES 9 desktop image was created and fine tuned by a team of 4-6 Linux experts over a 18 month period. Many things were added and tweaked to make it work for all of our applications. They are gone now.

Let's ignore the plan to upgrade to SLES 10.1 for now. We just want to be able to pick up the image and put it on other workstations/desktops that may or may not have exactly the same hardware. How can I do that without starting all over again.

In my former life, I did this all the time with AIX images. We used the "NIM" tools that would switch or add needed drivers and would allow you to change disk partitions as needed. No need to adjust the basic image.

Thanks,

I've done this without a problem by just using Ghost. My hardware was different, but I can't say I switched drive controllers.
Change the kernel to the -smp kernel (or -bigsmp if you need pae). That covers the processors.
Since the kernel should treat both drive types (SATA and SAS) as scsi drives, then they should both be /dev/sda (typically) so you shouldn't see a difference. Do you have a test machine that you can just dive in and test it on?
I don't use it, but you might want to look at Novell's Zenworks Linux Management to do the imaging. It may be overkill though.

Tell him to try and upgrade one of those, and instead
of using arconis use netcat and dd to transfer the image
to new hardware. Not that I have any idea of what or how
arconis does (it).


Cheers,
Tink