tips on how to clone a machine

Hello,
we have a couple of machines that we want to clone/mirror to change the disk partition scheme and other small details, and then just put the disks of the temporary machines in the production ones.
We thout of installing a basic OS on temporary machines with the partition scheme we need, mirror all the files (the first run will copy all the files with the running system and delete the files in the destination machine that do not exist on the source one, the second run will be done with all the services offline for consistency), then fix the UUID in the synced fstab, and in the end do the rest of the small fixes we want before swapping the disks.
As an alternative, is the ISPConfig Migration Toolkit suitable for this task?
Any other suggestions?

 

Might be, if you make the temporary machine into production machine after Migration Tooling the system to it. Swapping disk might work if the temporary machine has identical enough hardware. You should first try if a system disk taken from those temporary machines boots on the production machine.
Another alternative way to accomplish your goal would be using Clonezilla to create a disk image copy of the production machine as backup (to restore from that back to the starting position if things break), then something like SystemRescue CD to resize the file systems and disk partitions. Whether this works depends on what file systems are on the disk (some file systems can be grown but not shrunk, or not resized at all). I would use this way, I think this is least amount of work and highest chance of working OK, plus no need for extra machine.
Still another way would be to take images (with Clonezilla) from disk partitions on the production machine and restore them to different sized disk partitions on another disk. If it is system disk, it needs to be made bootable.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonezilla
  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemRescue

Practice with these tools before touching the production machines.