We are in the process of migrating one of our compute engines (a CUDA
Nvidia GPU close coupled multichassis unit using Infiniband for the
compute fabric) to SL7 from SL6.
I have a fully operational SL 7 installation on my workstation that also
has a CUDA Nvidia GPU. We will first migrate the head node of the
compute engine to SL 7 and then continue with the rest of the nodes (the
head node has the 802.3 connection to the LAN and then Internet/WAN).
We plan to clone the SL7 boot harddrive from my workstation rather than
go through a full install from media -- we have done this before and
find cloning and then readjusting partitions to be the fastest method in
our circumstances.
In the past, we have physically removed drives and used an external
cloning device -- easy to do on the primary servers as these all have
drives in externally removable carriers -- but this would require me to
open up and tear down my workstation. I have mounted a new drive --
upon which we shall be putting SL7 for the compute engine -- in an
external USB3 interface. My workstation detects the drive; under SL7,
it is /dev/sdj . However, a dd does not work -- it seems not to want to
clone beyond 4 GBytes, rather than the full drive (the destination hard
drive has sufficient capacity to hold the entire image of the source
hard drive). My workstation has multiple bootable harddrives -- I am
booting from a different drive than the one from which I am cloning and
the clone source and target drives are not mounted during the cloning
(obviously, still visible in /dev ).
My next approach -- before disassembly -- will be to try clonezilla or
the equivalent. As I understand clonezilla, I boot from the clonezilla
dvd and then clone from source to target. Does clonezilla permit
cloning over a USB3 interface, or only a USB 2 (that I also can use)?
We are using ext4 partitions.
Does anyone have a preferred utility over clonezilla?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Yasha Karant
