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Creating a New Cloud Server (Cloning) From a Saved Image


NOTE: This article is written for our Classic Cloud Control Panel. A version of this article is also available for our New Cloud Control Panel.

This article will walk you through creating a new server from an existing On-Demand, or Saved Image - also referred to as a Snapshot.  This is a very handy feature that will save you time on server setup and configuration, provided you already have a saved image of a server with security configured, applications installed, and users created.

For Example:

  • A Linux server running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)
  • A Windows Server 2008 64 bit, with SQL Standard 2008 R2

NOTE:  While you can create a different size server from that of the saved image, you must still use the same base OS version.

The first part of the procedure takes you through creating a snapshot image. If your snapshot image has already been created you can skip ahead to step 6.

1. Log into the Classic Cloud Control Panel.

 login1.png

2. Click Hosting and then Cloud Servers.

 cp_Servers.png

3. Select the server you want to clone by clicking on it in the list of servers. If you already have an image of the server you want cloned, then you can skip ahead to step 6.

4. After the Server Information page  loads,  click the Images tab.

5. You will need a snapshot of the server that you want to clone.  Click the New On-Demand Image button located in the Server Images table.  Type the name you want to give the image and click the Save Image button.

After the image has been saved, you will see it listed in the Server Images table.

NOTE:  You can also Restore a server from a saved Image by using the button located here.

6. Click Hosting then Cloud Servers.

 

 cp_Servers.png

7. After the Servers screen loads, click the Add Server button.

8. After the Image Select screen loads, click the My Server Images tab then select the image of the server you want to clone.

After you have selected an image, the Server Configuration window will open.

9. Fill in the name of the server (up to 64 characters) and select the size, then click the Create Server button.

10. The server will now begin the build process. There are two things to note here:

  • The initial password for this server will display here briefly.  This is the Administrator account password in Windows and the root password for Linux.  You can copy this password directly from this screen as another method for obtaining your server password, rather than waiting for the email.
  • Below that is the status. In this example it will show a percentage for how complete the build is.  If you do not see the status updating, simply click the Reload button and the status will update.

After the server is done building, the following screen appears.  Notice the status will read Active. At this point, you can RDP or SSH into your server — it is ready to go!



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12 Comments

How can I use or share a saved server image across more than one account?

In the next gen open cloud, would we be able to take image backup of instance of 620GB or more?

Is there a method to create a forensically sound image i.e. suspend the server, create an SHA1 Hash, create the snapshot and then Hash the snapshot to verify its integrity ?

You can suspend the server by shutting it down before taking the snapshot, and you can manually take a hash of the image once it's been created in Cloud Files. Unfortunately I don't think there's anything automated right now that would take a proper hash of an image right as it's created. You might be able to get more information from the OpenStack community on what may be planned in that area, or post a request to the Rackspace product feedback forum:

http://feedback.rackspace.com/forums/71021-product-feedback

Otherwise the best I can think of for now would be trying to do this programmatically through the API - create the image, then as soon as it's complete retrieve and hash the image.

making the image is pretty straight forward. What about iptables and vhost configurations? Is there a way to do this too?

Snapshot in what sense? If you need to change IP addresses in those files after restoring a snapshot you might use a utility like sed to make substitutions. If you're looking to clone servers at a configuration level rather than a full snapshot you might look at tools like Blueprint, Puppet, or Chef.

Hello,

What is the size of an image backup?

For example if I have a server of 2GB RAM (that is 80GB on disk).

How big will my server image be? 80GB? less, more than 80?

Or could you please tell me an estimated of the compress ratio you apply on the images?

The images are compressed, though how compressed the result is will depend on the types of files on the image. At most the image shouldn't use more than whatever disk space is being used on the instance.

I can't give you a compression ratio (again, because it varies - text files would compress much smaller than image files, for example). You can probably expect the compression to be about the same as gzip.

Thanks for your quick answer, so.. seeing the problem from the worst side, the biggest size for my image if the server is of 80GB on disk it will be of 80GB the image, is this correct?

Almost always, yes. I hate to qualify it like that, but there are exceptions, usually when the disk has been close to full a while and many snapshots have been made of the server. It has to do with the way the imaging is done on next-gen servers - there are more details in this article on the snapshot limitations:

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/rackspace-cloud-essentials-4-cloud-server-snapshot-limitations

Thank you for all your answers. Just the last one.. the image only includes the size of the disk space or does it also include the RAM.
I have had experience with some virtualization tools were the image creations include the RAM usage + disk usage.

The image does not include any of the RAM, nor any contents of swap space. Only the contents of the data volumes in use for the server should be included in a snapshot.

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