Cymen's Blog

This basic approach works:

1. Power down target system.
2. Create another logical volume the same size as the target system.
3. dd if=/dev/$PV/$TARGET of=/dev/$PV/$CLONE bs=1M
4. Copy Xen config and modify with clone details
5. Power up clone, change hostname and any other relevant details
6. Power up target

For a 32 GB LV, dd took just over 11 minutes to dump the data from the target volume to the clone volume on my hardware. This was for a Windows Server 2003 clone using DHCP so the only thing I changed was the host name (so far).

I’d think the LVM snapshot method might be able to do this more intelligently but I couldn’t quite grok it right away and this method worked.