CSIM Technical Notes

How-to clone a FreeBSD virtual machine on VMware

There is no free tool to clone a FreeBSD virtual machine on VMware.

Instead, one can do the following:

1. create the virtual machine with vSphere client
2. boot the virtual machine using FreeBSD live CD
3. partition the disk in FreeBSD
4. enable and start the network interface:

   ifconfig en0 inet 192.41.170.xxx netmask 255.255.255.0
   

5. in the source FreeBSD machine: in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, add the line:

   PermitRootLogin yes
   

   and restart sshd:

   /etc/rc.d/sshd restart
   

6. make sure that dump and restore will have enough temporary storage:

   export TMPDIR=/mnt
   

7. mount the root file system on the target machine:

   mount /dev/xxx /mnt
   

8. copy the file system using dump and restore:

   cd /mnt
   ssh root@192.41.170.xxx "dump -u0 -f - -L filesystem" | restore -r -f -
   cd /
   umout /mnt
   

9. repeat for each file system
10. in the source FreeBSD machine: in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, remove the line PermitRootLogin yes and restart sshd:

    /etc/rc.d/sshd restart
    

11. configure the Ethernet devices on the target FreeBSD
12. configure the bootloader:

    mount /dev/root filesystem /mnt
    gpart bootcode -b /mnt/boot/pmbr -p /mnt/boot/gptboot -i 1 disk device
    

13. update /etc/fstab in the target FreeBSD