Cloning a VPS

kingfish

kingfish

Champion of Awesome
Sep 25, 2007
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I've got a vps server all setup for development how I like with a bunch of packages installed and shit. I was wondering does anyone know how I can make a ghost or clone of it so I would be able to setup a new VPS with it's same specs from that instantly. My host doesn't have any obvious option that seems to do this.

Anyway know how this can be done? Thanks.
 


depends on your host and what they support.
not sure about that vmware product, but generally speaking, your host is gonna have to support cloning for you to be able to do this. i would imagine that trying to use any 3rd party product to do this would only lead to trouble.

take a look at "cloud" hosts. rackspace, slicehost and ec2 all support cloning a vps to multiple instances (listed in order of complexity).
 
With debian you can at least get a dpkg list of everything installed, and copy that. Filesystem layout won't vary much from a fresh install - your /etc will be different, /var and /usr too.

What kind of development are you doing? A lamp stack isn't too hard to move. Same with ruby (just catch your installed gems). If it's just a dev database right now, just use phpmyadmin to copy the schema and go from there without the data.

Definitely moving to a cloud host is your next step. Once you scale out once, you can scale out as many times as possible from there. You would clone from the admin panel or dump to an EC2 image and bring up new server via the command line.

Always document everything you do to make a new environment in the future.
 
It's a lamp system on centos5
Yeah sucks my documentation of what I've done is not quite what it should be so I guess next time I'll write that shit down
 
in the old days ppl wrote scripts for that shit. might be an option. for example ip adress etc will (likly) need modifing anyways.
 
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