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  • 1.  excluding hard drives when cloning a vm

    Posted Mar 25, 2011 07:10 PM

    Hi,

    I want to clone a VM that has several drives. The C: drive has the OS (W2008R2) and is fairly small, D:, E: and F: are large (TeraBytes) and contain the data. I only need the C: drive in the clone. Is there any way to exclude the other drives during the cloning process? I clicked through the wizard but it didn't give me an option.

    Thank you,

    Matthias



  • 2.  RE: excluding hard drives when cloning a vm
    Best Answer

    Posted Mar 25, 2011 07:26 PM

    I would use the VMware Standalone Converter where you do have a choice of which drives to clone.  http://vmware.com/go/converter



  • 3.  RE: excluding hard drives when cloning a vm

    Posted Mar 25, 2011 07:45 PM

    Thank you - I'll give that a try.

    Matthias



  • 4.  RE: excluding hard drives when cloning a vm

    Posted Mar 27, 2011 10:50 AM

    Another option, assuming you can have a small amount of downtime, is to simply to shut down the VM, unpresent (do NOT delete) the virtual disks, then clone.  After you have one clone, re-add the disks (in the correct order of SCSI target ID) then you are all set. 

    OR - if you want to get into the weeds of things, put a snapshot on the VM, then via command line, use vmkfstools to make a copy of the boot disk.