Hello!
We thought it would be important to share this information as it might be interesting to someone who wants to replicate the same VPS across many instances in order to create a farm of web servers (for example).
This uses very similar concepts to our LVM XEN backup post a while back.
Step 1: Take a snapshot of the current VPS
This is simple. Use the lvcreate command with the -s option to create a snapshot of the running VPS. We assume your VPS is 5GB in size, so just replace that with however large your VPS is :
lvcreate -s -L 5GB -n snapshot_name /dev/VolGroup00/running_vps_image
Step 2: Create your new VPS
This is important. You want to create a new vps, assign a MAC and IP address first and let the creation process fully finish. Then shut the VPS down.
Step 3: Copy the snapshot to the new VPS
All you have to do is use the dd command to transfer the snapshot image to the newly created VPS image :
dd if=/dev/VolGroup00/snapshot_name of=/dev/VolGroup00/new_vps_image
All done! Dont forget to remove the snapshot after your done with it :
lvremove -f /dev/VolGroup00/snapshot_name
Start up the new vps and you should have a carbon copy of the previous vps!
