Hello, we are migrating to a cloud environment and I am curious if it is possible to clone a SQL Server? We will be standing up several instances and really really don't want to stand each one up from scratch. I know SQL wouldn't be happy in regards to server name/IP etc.. but assuming all the hard drive letters are the same and the architecture is the same... is it possible to clone?
I was assuming there would be some registry editing or modifying of the system databases but didn't know if anyone had an established process for this I could piggy back on? I'm not even sure where to start with what would need to be modified in order for SQL Server to be happy after its cloned.
We would be cloning stand alone instances of SQL Enterprise edition with no HA configured or anything. We do have server audits and specifications set up though.
Both Azure and AWS support a P2V type migration of a server from on-premise to the cloud environment. I have clients that have done SQL Server on-premise to an AWS EC2 instance with no downtime. We had monitoring watching the server and literally we never got paged on that SQL Server went offline.