HPP Enterprises P4000 SAN - Manual (Page 54)

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Process preparing a VM for Cloning
 Create, install and configure the Windows VM
 Apply Windows Updates and Service Packs
 Install Citrix XenTools paravirtualized drivers
 Install applications and any other desired customization, apply application updates
 Defragment the hard disk
 Copy the contents of the \support\tools\deploy.cab file to a \sysprep folder in the VM
 Run the sysprep utility and shutdown the VM
The virtual machine is now ready for export, copy, snapshot and create, or SAN based Snapshots or
clones.
Figure 47. VM clones
Note that unsupported methods include such methods as NewSID and Symantec Ghostwalker. Each
generates a unique SID and hostname on the applied image.
By utilizing XenCenter’s console for exporting, copying, snapshot and creating VMs, the VM is
always copied in a process that forces the new creation of Storage Repositories and virtual disks on
those repositories thereby not requiring changes to their UUID.
Changing the Storage Repository and Virtual Disk UUID
A universally unique identifier, UUID, is used to identify objects inside a XenServer host or resource
pool. For storage repositories, this identifier is created upon creation of a storage repository and
allows one SR to be uniquely identified from another. The UUID creation algorithm ensures this
uniqueness. An example UUID would be 6411ec59-7c06-3aa1-99d0-37a15a679427. A virtual disk
is stored on a SR container and also contains a different UUID. This is not a problem when leveraging
XenCenter data movement commands. However, HP StorageWorks P4000 SANs support many
efficient features that allow instantaneous snapshots or smart clones to be created with a single
backend storage command. At the storage level, one or many volumes may be created from a base
volume without the data passing from SAN to XenServer host to SAN. This process is instantaneous,