Imaging Linux boxes with Zenworks imaging
	Part XIII. (Mass) Installations, also dual-boot

Imaging Linux boxes with Zenworks imaging

Jurjen Bokma

January 2008

Can ZENworks imaging be used to clone a Linux machine (and if so, how)?
What are the restrictions ZENworks imaging puts on the way a machine is partitioned?
What limitations does ZENworks imaging impose on the filesystems used?
Can we use ZENworks imaging to put Linux in a designated space on a harddisk without damaging any other OSes or data already present on the disk?
Does ZENworks imaging support RAID? LVM?
Can we safely use ZENworks imaging on machines with multiple disks?

Novell Zenworks has so-called “preboot services”, one of which is imaging. My colleague Arjan has set up and maintains a few imaging servers, and I'm trying to find answers to the following questions:

Can ZENworks imaging be used to clone a Linux machine (and if so, how)?

Yes, it can, but only to a very limited extent. I restored a simple setup with the root filesystem on a primary partition (/dev/hda1) and swap on a logical (/dev/hda5). I was able to include the the swap in that image, but restoring it failed. Then I took an image that excluded the swap, but when I restored that image, the swap partition was left out as well. So... if we want to restore a Linux disk that has a swap partition, we have to do some partitioning by ourselves. That may be practical for the occasional restore, but it isn't for an enterprise grade deployment system.


Booting Ubuntu Hardy unattendedly using preseed		What are the restrictions ZENworks imaging puts on the way a machine is partitioned?