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I got any order for seven Linux-HA NFS clusters, which consist of two nodes a piece. Each node has a software RAID 1 configuration. I'm trying to speed up the process here.

How could I go about cloning these? I've never really done any massive clone deployments.

I've read that clonezilla doesn't support software raid, but I don't see why I couldn't clone each individual hard drive in the software raid array.

Matthew
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  • I know it's not professional, but if you take one of the disks out of the array, both the original disk and the removed one will then have the ability to rebuild themselves given a new disk partitioned in the same sense, and inserted into the array on another server. – NickW Mar 13 '13 at 17:11
  • haha, we don't know the word professional at this shop..I work for the marine industry, everything is a little weird. I could do something like that with imagining don't you think? Only image one drive at a time and rebuild the array. – Matthew Mar 13 '13 at 17:19
  • Yeah basically, you just need to copy one of the two disks, RAID1 can rebuild itself quite easily, the only issue you might have is booting, but most boot loaders seem to handle booting from RAID nowadays.. – NickW Mar 13 '13 at 17:22
  • Both hard drives have a /boot partition, so it shouldn't be a problem... hopefully. – Matthew Mar 13 '13 at 17:24
  • Have you tried dd from a linux boot cd such as knoppix or a gparted boot disc? – MDMoore313 Mar 13 '13 at 17:38

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If you try to clone under mdadm, you are just asking for trouble if you ever mix up the cloned pairs. In other words, if one of these machines has a problem and you plug the drive into the other to try and recover the data from it, mdadm will be mighty confused by seeing three drives that all appear to be part of the same two drive array.

Best to create a new array on each machine, and then rsync, or if you must, partclone your filesystem over. Also with grub2 you can skip the /boot partition and just install it on both MBRs directly.

psusi
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