Cloning - Best Practices

Updated by Jake Malmad on Nov 15, 2013
Article Code: kb/999

The Lumen Cloud platform provides a rich interface for management of your virtual environment. When designing a virtual environment, one will often require consistency across all virtual machines- in the patch level, configuration, or installed applications, among others. Lumen Cloud provides three means of automation and repeat-ability: Clones, Templates, and Blueprints. While all these technologies can be used to produce the same results, there are best practices for each use case. This is the first in a series of articles which will illustrate said practices, focusing on cloning.

Cloning a server takes an exact copy of an existing machine. Cloning is not supported from powered off servers. The source server must be powered on in order to clone as a new virtual machine. The Lumen Cloud clone server wizard will prompt you for the machine group, new name, and network settings. A cloned server is, for most purposes, an exact copy of the source; however, certain underlying settings are changed (UUID, MAC, SID, etc.). Cloning is an easy way to produce alternate copies of existing infrastructure. Common use cases are migrating servers from "test" to "development" or adding another web server to an existing stack.

There is a sysprep limitation on the number of additional clone generations a cloned Windows server may produce (server1->server2, server2->server3, server3->server4). Windows Server 2008 has a limit of 5 syspreps, while Server 2012 has 999. To confirm sysprep availability, run the command slmgr /dlv. If "rearms remaining" is nonzero, cloning attempts should be successful. If you exceed the sysprep limit, resulting in a clone failure, please contact Customer Care (help@ctl.io) to verify the issue and to clean up the failed job. This limitation does not affect the number of times you can clone a server from the original source server (server1->server2, server1->server3, server1->server4). This limitation also does not affect Linux servers. Please see the section titled "Resetting Windows Activation" in this TechNet article for more information.

It is important to understand the changes enacted by a clone job, to minimize complications. The most impactful changes are:

  • It is not recommended to clone domain member servers, as the clone operation often fails. Additionally, there is the potential for Group Policies to have unknown or undesired effects as well as the potential to cause issues within Active Directory.

  • Virtual machines clones are issued a new Universally Unique IDentifier (UUID). This affect user scripts and API calls to the UUID of the virtual machine.

  • Virtual machines clones are issued new MAC addresses for attached virtual network adapters. This may have an effect on software or licensing that is sensitive to MAC address changes.

  • Guest operating systems for virtual machine clones may share computer names and static IP addresses with their original counterparts. Be sure to account for this prior to power-on.

  • Additional attached disks from the source server are not automatically attached to the clone. If these disks are intended to be attached to the clone then this is a manual process on the guest operating system.

  • The impact of cloning may vary between Operating Systems. For example, Server 2012 has features built-in to facilitate "cleaner" clones of Virtual Machines than earlier revisions.

  • Text files stored on user's Desktops will NOT be carried over in the Clone if they are stored on the C Drive of a windows virtual machine

  • When a clone is requested for a server with multiple NICs, the newly cloned machine will only have a single NIC.

  • Cloning is a function of Control and requires certain ports to be open on the source server to work properly. Please review our kb on the topic of Required ports for Control functionality for more information.

  • To avoid version conflicts during the cloning process, keep source servers up to date by following our Self-Service Updates of VMWare Tools kb.