Originally posted by: DavidChristian

Does anyone have any advice/best practice on the best way to clone an lpar please?

I need to create another test environment on a Power 7 non-production frame. It can be an exact copy of an existing lpar which has 3 volume groups: rootvg, appvg, datavg.  I'm aware that I can 'clone' rootvg using a mksysb and restore that on the new system but what is the best way to copy the other volume groups?

I believe that the existing test system was built by partially failing over the storage from the Live system (using EMC Recoverpoint) and using migratepv to copy the physical volumes to new storage LUNS. However, for various reasons, we don't have that option anymore. 

Thanks in advance.

Originally posted by: Wouter Liefting

You can copy (or FlashCopy) the LUNs at the SAN level, but this can be tricky as you're also copying the PVIDs, LVIDs and other unique numbers.

The easiest way to clone a non-rootvg VG from within AIX is to use savevg/restvg. This will dump the whole VG (both the metadata and the data) in a single file which you can then copy and restore, similar to an mksysb.

In fact, I once needed to clone a system with a complex but not overly large VG setup. I did a savevg to backup all the non-rootvg VGs, and made sure these backup files were stored somewhere in rootvg. I then created an mksysb, which included the whole rootvg including these savevg files. Restored the mksysb on a different system, then did a restvg to restore the other VGs from the savevg files, done.

Originally posted by: DavidChristian

Thanks for the prompt response Wouter, I'll have a look into that!