Cloning Computer in Vmware problem
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
Yesterday when I cloned a computer, something very strange happened. I ran the clone computer wizard. In the end of the wizard I checked “edit computer settings before submitting” to enlarge the disk space before performing the clone. I change disk size and submitted my job.
Once the server was cloned, I where going to do a sysprep, but for some reason it did not work, so I decided to destroy the VM and start over again. This is where the strange part starts. When I tried to redo the cloning the original VMDK file was gone. It seems that when destroying the new computer, the old computer’s vmdk was removed.(to me this sounds very scary).
After some research I found in the new computers folder, there was still a VMDK. So what had infact happen was that 2 VM’s pointed to the same VMDK file. When I destroyed the VM, the vmx file of the new computer was removed as well as the common VMDK file for the both computers. The new cloned VMDK file was never used.
I managed to recreate the VM by creating a new VM, removing the disk, adding a existing disk to this VM. I then cloned this configuration to the old computer name so I get a good directory structure on the SAN. I then removed the VM from virtual center and manually removed the required files on the SAN.
No data was lost, the only thing is it was quite scary when it happened. I will report this to VMware to get it corrected in the next version of VC.
