Solaris 10: How to image a machine?
- by nonot1
I've got a Solaris 10 workstation that I'd like to create a full image backup from. The machine has 2 drives, one UFS for system root, and 1 ZFS for data storage.
I intend to add a third HD to keep the backup images of both primary drives (including any zfs snapshots). The purpose is not disaster recovery, but rather to allow me to easily blow away a series of application installation/configuration changes I intend to try.
What's the best way to do this? I'm not too familiar with Solaris, but have some basic Linux knowledge.
I looked at CloneZilla, but it does not support Solaris. I'm OK with just a dd | gzip > image style solution, but I'd need some way to first zero-out the non-used blocks on the primary drives to aid gzip. They are are much larger than my 3rd drive, but hardly have any real data.
Update to clarify:
I specifically want to avoid using any file-system snapshot functionality, because part of the app configuration changes involve/depend slightly on existing and new snapshots. Ideally the full collection of snapshots should be part of the backup.
Virtualization not an option, because the goal is to do performance evaluation on a very specific HW configuration. For the same reason, the spurious "back up" snapshots could skew performance data.
Thank you
