How to clone a SharePoint 2010 Hyper-V VM

If anyone has ever used Microsoft's Hyper-V Server, you've discovered that the interface is a little difficult.  For one, you're presented with no GUI, which can be intimidating to some.  In any case, I was able to spend a little time to uncover a few steps that could help towards cloning a standalone SharePoint instance hosted on VM.  Let's begin...

Your first step involves logging into the Hyper-V base.  On the base, what we want to accomplish is to create a copy of the VHD file containing the SharePoint 2010 instance.  For some, you may log into the base and find that there are no visible windows.  This little obstacle can be overcome by calling the Task Manager window; simultaneously press the Control-Shift-Esc keys.  That should help ease the nerves a bit.

With the Task Manager open, click the File->New Task(Run) option from the file menu.  This will popup a "Create New Task" window similar to what you'd find when you recall the run command in a normal windows environment.  At this point, you want to enter the following command “c:\Windows\System32\sconfig.cmd” to bring up the Server Configuration User window.  You'll want to open the "Create New Task" window again to open an instance of the command prompt as well.

Now, you need to know where the VHD file is located that you wish to copy.  If you don't, a quick way of determining the location is by connecting to the base image from another machine with Windows Explorer and looking under the VM configuration file repository normally located under "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines."  Open the available XML files until you find the one containing a reference to the file you want to copy.  With this, you will have the path to the VHD file.

On the base machine, go to the DOS prompt and navigate to the location of the VHD file.  Perform a DOS command to copy the file to wherever you wish.  Once copied, you can paste the file to the Hyper-V base image of your choice.

With a copy of the VHD file on your target base image, you'll need to log into a server that hosts Hyper-V Manager.  From Hyper-V Manager, navigate to the target base machine and begin the process of creating a new "Virtual Machine."  Assign a name to the new "Virtual Machine," and allocate an adequate amount of memory.  Configure the networking credentials for the VM before finally selecting the location of the VHD file copied over.

With those steps, you will have created a new VM instance that is an exact clone of the prior VM instance.  But we're not done just yet.  Now we want to rename the new VM instance, or suffer through duplicate name conflicts.  However, because we're also working with SharePoint, we need to modify the Alternate Access Mappings in Central Administration before anything else occurs.

Connect to the new VM instance from Hyper-V Manager.  Log in under a local administrator account and open "Central Administration."  When and if you're prompted for credentials, use the local administrator credentials.  Navigate to "Configure Alternate Access Mappings" and configure the URLs, leveraging the prior VM instance name, to point to localhost.  

One other SharePoint centric step required before officially renaming the server is to run an stsadm command.  There may be a powershell command you can run, but I haven't performed enough research to determine what that would be.  So you need to open a command prompt as administrator by explicitly selecting the "run as administrator" option.  In your command prompt, change the directory to "c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\bin" or wherever the bin folder for 14-hive is located.  Run the command "Stsadm -o renameserver -newservername {YourNewServerName} -oldservername {YourOldServerName}"  to tell SharePoint that a server name change is in effect.

Now, let's bring up Server Manager to change that pesky server name by selecting Start->Administrative Tools->Server Manager.  From the Server Summary section, select "Change System Properties."  Click the "Change" button from the "Computer Name" tab and change the server name in the available text field.  You'll be asked to restart the VM.  Allow the server to restart.

Not quite done, but we're almost there.  Log back into the VM instance and open "Central Administration" again.  Go to the "Manage the farm administrators group" under the Security section.  You'll more than likely see accounts that reflect the server name of the prior VM instance.  You'll need to edit those accounts so that their names display the appropriate server name.

Voila!  These steps should get you through cloning a VM instance with SharePoint 2010.  A few assumptions are made with this tutorial and that is that it is assumed that SQL Server resides on the same VM instance.  Also assumed is that you have knowledge of the basic DOS commands required of this tutorial.  And finally, it is assumed that you have full access to the Hyper-V environment.