From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform and Storage Engineering
A few months back I had mentioned here that we had the ability for our customers to clone their Cloud Enterprise Virtual Machines on our radar. I’m happy to say that this feature is now available in our customer portal here. Here are a few example use cases that may fit your business need:
- You have five application virtual machines and you need to spin-up five more to accommodate growth. Rather than spending countless hours and incurring operational costs by having your System Administrator customize the application for each new web server, you take the following steps: login to the portal, locate the VM that you want to clone from (i.e. the master VM), evaluate the cost of the new VMs (no cost to clone), choose your quantity, and go.
- You have a business that gets seasonal spikes and uses virtual machines for high volume testing. You already have a parked VM with hosting.com to reduce your cost and you treat it that as the master VM (or image). When it comes time to spin up a ton of VMs, rather than purchase new VMs and then configure them, you choose to clone the parked VM. This saves not only time but money. Another advantage of cloning from the parked VM is that since it is ‘off’ your master VM, it is not getting cluttered with log files or profiles like a production virtual machine would.
Take a peek at the process by visiting our walk through located at our support page. I’d encourage you to watch the video to see how you can accomplish this by viewing the video below.