In the past I use to use a utility called mkcdrec which has a successor project called relax and recover (rear for short) I haven't used the new version but it should work well.

That said if you can package every thing in rpms you could use spacewalk or katello to create identical builds including copying config files. As a long term solution I like this option because it allows you to quickly rebuild after a catastrophic failure in a very clean precise way. It also allows for quick expansion of an existing environment. ‎In my environment the typical spacewalk build takes 20 minutes and in most cases includes every thing needed to bring the box up immediately aside from state data such as database content and my normal database recovery scripts handle that and in many cases spacewalk even automatically executes them after the install is complete.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
  Original Message  
From: Yasha Karant
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2015 20:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: clonezilla or equivalent

We are in the process of migrating one of our compute engines (a CUDA 
Nvidia GPU close coupled multichassis unit using Infiniband for the 
compute fabric) to SL7 from SL6.

I have a fully operational SL 7 installation on my workstation that also 
has a CUDA Nvidia GPU. We will first migrate the head node of the 
compute engine to SL 7 and then continue with the rest of the nodes (the 
head node has the 802.3 connection to the LAN and then Internet/WAN). 
We plan to clone the SL7 boot harddrive from my workstation rather than 
go through a full install from media -- we have done this before and 
find cloning and then readjusting partitions to be the fastest method in 
our circumstances.

In the past, we have physically removed drives and used an external 
cloning device -- easy to do on the primary servers as these all have 
drives in externally removable carriers -- but this would require me to 
open up and tear down my workstation. I have mounted a new drive -- 
upon which we shall be putting SL7 for the compute engine -- in an 
external USB3 interface. My workstation detects the drive; under SL7, 
it is /dev/sdj . However, a dd does not work -- it seems not to want to 
clone beyond 4 GBytes, rather than the full drive (the destination hard 
drive has sufficient capacity to hold the entire image of the source 
hard drive). My workstation has multiple bootable harddrives -- I am 
booting from a different drive than the one from which I am cloning and 
the clone source and target drives are not mounted during the cloning 
(obviously, still visible in /dev ).

My next approach -- before disassembly -- will be to try clonezilla or 
the equivalent. As I understand clonezilla, I boot from the clonezilla 
dvd and then clone from source to target. Does clonezilla permit 
cloning over a USB3 interface, or only a USB 2 (that I also can use)? 
We are using ext4 partitions.

Does anyone have a preferred utility over clonezilla?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Yasha Karant