Does it make sense to take a vmware snapshot and clone crystal server

[Former Member]

I have installed and deployed a verification instance of Crystal Reports Server on Windows 2008.

I now wish to deploy an identical production instance. Of course the ipaddress, hostname,

license key, and windows name will have to be different. And the "mac" address will be different.

Instead of re-installing everything from scratch, is it productive to take a vmware/vcenter snapshot

and clone a new system? And then, tweak a few items such as ipaddress, hostname, etc.

                              ...thanks, Stanley

[DellSC · Accepted solution]

No.  There is a fair amount of information in the system configuration that is tied to the server name.  If you clone a server like that you take a chance that your new server will actually be connecting to/trying to cluster with the one it was cloned from instead of running in it's own "space".

-Dell

[former_member200290]

Hi,

Actually I would like to suggest that this is possible, depending on how you have installed and what version of CR Server you are running.

Not to take away from Dell's answer, it is correct when it comes to CR server 2008. For CR Server 2011 and 2013 you sould be able to do this, as we do this all the time for non-clustered environments where the database and server are all on one machine for the BI 4.x suite.

To do this when we install we make sure when it asks for a server name use localhost. Similarily we go into the ODBC datasources needed for BI 4.x and make sure they are set to localhost as opposed to the machine name.

And I think this is all we need to do. We do this so in VMWare VCloud we can clone the same machine and change the clone's IP, MAC address and server name so we can cluster the clone to the original image.

I will check to see if there is anything else to this, but I don't think so.

Kind Regards,

Trevor Dubinsky

[DellSC]

That makes lots of sense, Trevor!  Thanks for the info!

-Dell