Quote:
Originally Posted by
psychocandy
Got server that I want to have an 'image' of disk to keep in case of failure. What I want to be able to do is, in the event of disk failure, remove system disk replace with cloned disk (same slot) and reboot.
Trouble is I cant take this server down to single user.
That rules out cloning the disk, as already stated.
What you need is clone the partitioning and the file systems. As you need to do it live, the only viable solution would be to create a snapshot of the file system and use that snapshot to create you alternate boot disk. The precise way to do that depends on whether you use UFS or ZFS (fssnap vs zfs snapshot), which you do not state.
Quote:
Is dd still a viable option?
not at all.
Quote:
Or is lucreate better to do?
Possibly, lucreate works at the file system level but I'm unsure it uses snapshots so it might fail depending on the applications you use.
Some people are also using flash archive (flarcreate) to clone their environments, although it wasn't designed for that and might suffer the same issue. Without snapshots, you need to separately backup data from application like databases or directory servers.