Cloning Solaris & Linux servers

[stek]

Nice.

I thought that it should also be possible to use a PIXE boot setup of some sort, can't remember what's possible with SPARC. Not used one rwally since Solaris 6.
Thinking again, isn't PIXE just like JumpStart? I.e. you can boot and install a bare metal box from the eeprom?

SPARC (and POWER) traditionally uses BOOTP but can WAN boot too (later ones) basically over http(s) but BOOTP'ing is only a small part of what Jumpstart does, it builds the full box, i.e. configures filesystem slices, setups NIC, installs additional packages, patches, build zones/containers etc.

[worzelGummidge]

The easiest solution is to use NetBackup because it will be the same solution for both and can be recovered from bare metal.

After a full backup of everything for each server, using the same hardware configuration, Netbackup would restore a base image to each machine and then perform a full restore.


Without NetBackup, to just restore the server into a state that it was in you will be using a Solaris Jet server along with a flar image (big zip file). Solaris 8 would be a problem as integrating this with flar and Jet can get a bit tricky for the disk mirroring.

For the Linux server then use Kickstart to build the back OS. No idea what the equivalent for flar is on Linux though.

NetBackup would be the corporate solution that would always work.

The Solaris solutions would work and restore to a point when you took the flar image. Tricky for Solaris 8 though.

Linux - Not too sure.