New in IBM Cloud Managed Services v1.4 - Virtual Machine Capture and Clone

IBM Cloud Managed Services is a fully managed, highly secure IaaS cloud optimized for critical enterprise workloads. IBM Cloud Managed Services offers unique instance-level VM uptime SLAs to 99.95% and many advantages of a private cloud—such as options for dedicated servers and storage—while providing flexible scaling and the benefits of cloud economics.

With IBM Cloud Managed Services v1.4, a new feature is introduced to capture and clone an unmanaged Virtual AIX Machine. In this article, we give an overview of the function and the individual steps.
Many thanks to Adrian Moti, Radu Adam, Mihai Andrei and Dan Serbanescu who contributed both the documentation and the implementation.

Overview
There are several practical use cases that benefit from the VM capture and clone function. 
For example, if a system has been configured as a basis for many other systems, this first system can be captured and then cloned to several other virtual machines. Or a system can be captured at various points in time and if the need arises, it can be reverted back to an earlier capture.

Before the capture and clone process can be started, a utility server is needed. With the help of that server, the next two steps are performed:

1. Capture a source system
2. Deploy the captured image to a target system

Step 0 - Creating a Capture & Clone Server
This utility server has to be set up for each data center that you want to use the capture and clone function. Even if you want to capture and clone multiple VMs in a data center, you only need this utility server once.

1. Log in to the Cloud Managed Services control User Interface
2. Provision a new Unmanaged AIX VM
3. Add a new disk to the provisioned
4. Perform required configuration steps, including the execution of the helper script makenimm
5. Write down the IP address of this server's en0 interface - you will need it later

The server that was created will act as a utility system for the next steps. Now you are ready to use the capture and Clone capability.

Step 1 - Capturing an unmanaged AIX machine
Capturing a source VM is aided by a script based automation.

1. Find the Capture & Clone server en0 IP address (see above) 
2. Login to the unmanaged AIX LPAR machine (called source LPAR) you want to capture with an administrative user (root).
3. Execute the vmcapture script, specifying the en0 IP address of the Capture and Clone Server.
4. Optionally, you can specify an mksysb image name. 
5. After the capture is completed successfully, a message is displayed with the image name to be used during deployment.

You are now ready to deploy the image you have captured from this source system   

Step 2 - Deploying an unmanaged AIX image
There is an automated script available to perform the deployment into the target system.

1. Using the Cloud Manages Services UI, Create a new unmanaged AIX VM. This is the target system to deploy the previously captured image.
2. Log on to the Capture & Clone Server 
3. Identify the mksysb image to be deployed on the target VM
4. Execute the vmdeploy command which automatically restores a captured mksysb image.

You will be able to remotely access the cloned LPAR via SSH using the credentials od the captured mksysb.