Fastest and easiest way to clone unraid server?

[kalvinnohobbes]

I want to clone it to different hardware with different drives/drive layout.    Usually I would just do a data copy over to the new server and reconfigure everything manually but I want to minimize downtime as best as possible.    Part of my issue is that I have a PfSense VM running within Unraid that controls all internet and network connectivity within my house, and a AD DC VM serving authentication.   The Pf VM has PCI passthru with 2x nic cards.  I have more of those nic cards to put in the cloned server.  I also have a few dockers that I want to move to the cloned server as well, mostly just Plex but I would like to retain metadata and history on those if possible.  

 

I know I will probably need to purchase a 2nd Unraid license which is fine as that will allow me to have a test server going forward after doing this conversion.   

 

I can list out my hardware if needed but since I am not passing thru any onboard devices I don't think different Intel generations should be that much of a contributing factor.   

 

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.  

[trurl]

Different hardware is usually pretty easy, especially if you just keep the drives. Why do you want to change those? 

[kalvinnohobbes]

The drive changes are only temporary while I rebuild my existing unraid server.    On the new server I will most likely have a different folder structure as I want to move to 6.9 RC2 for the multiple cache pools feature.  Also, as part of this new build I have a new network switch that would be configured slightly differently than the existing one.    Ideally I would like to clone the existing server onto the spare server, move the existing switch to the bottom of the rack where the cloned server is.   Then rack my new switch at the top and configure that and "new" unraid instance together.   

[trurl]

One thing to watch out for when copying user shares between servers is that rsync and other software will often create all the empty folders on the destination before beginning the copy. Those empty folders may all get created on one disk since they don't take any space and won't trigger Allocation Method to switch to another disk. Then the files get copied to those precreated folders and the disk may not have room for it all. Several ways to work around that, including copying smaller batches.