Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Creating a copy of the disk (vmdk) in VMware

When you need to have the a copy of the disk from one VM on the other:

  • Power off  source VM, copy your .vmdk files to destination VM (probably you would like to change disk name and flat name - just rename your files and edit smaller .vmdk file to set correct name for flat file).
  • Set new UUID for your copy of your original .vmdk file
/usr/sbin/vmkfstools -J setuuid path_to_destination_VM/filename.vmdk
  • Add new disk to your destination VM (using "Use an existing virtual disk" option)
  • Start your VMs (source and destination)
  • Mount new drive on your destination machine
We used this solution to make a quick copy of data files disks from primary Oracle server to standby Oracle server.

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