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The only strict hardware requirement is a 64-bit (x86-64) CPU, as this is required for the Windows Virtual Disk Service. We would recommend hosting images on a fileshare on a high-performance, reliable SAN on the same LAN as machines which will have clones. This is because clone data files only store changes made to that clone database, and all unmodified data must be read from the image file. A reliable connection is therefore important to ensure that SQL Server is able to access data whenever it is required, and a low-latency, high-bandwidth connection to images stored on hardware potentially capable of handling concurrent requests from multiple clones will improve performance. / comments
The only strict hardware requirement is a 64-bit (x86-64) CPU, as this is required for the Windows Virtual Disk Service.We would recommend hosting images on a fileshare on a high-performance, relia...
The error message "The device is not ready" (error 21) usually means that the network connection between the machine with the clone and the location where the image is stored is interrupted. In many cases, this can be difficult to recover without restarting SQL Server, since it puts the database into an error state, but that doesn't seem to be the situation here. Do you know of any steps that could be used to reproduce the problem? We might also be able to learn something from a full agent log file, if you wanted to share that with us through a support ticket. / comments
The error message "The device is not ready" (error 21) usually means that the network connection between the machine with the clone and the location where the image is stored is interrupted. In man...
You can find information about locating the log files here: https://documentation.red-gate.com/clone2/troubleshooting/log-locations It's the last part (SQL Clone Agent Service) which is most likely to be helpful. If you could open a ticket with support@red-gate.com and send the logs along then we can see if there's anything we can determine from them, thanks! / comments
You can find information about locating the log files here:https://documentation.red-gate.com/clone2/troubleshooting/log-locationsIt's the last part (SQL Clone Agent Service) which is most likely t...
Communication between the clone VHD and its parent image VHD is handled by the VHD driver and SMB over the underlying network, but the clone database appears to SQL Server as though it is on standard local disk. If the VHD driver isn't able to contact the image VHD to access data from it, it often responds with error 21 (the device is not ready). SQL Server responds to this error when accessing the disk by blocking access to the database, which can only be reliably resolved by restarting SQL Server. SQL Clone tries to reduce the risk of this happening by detaching the database when Windows informs the agent that the image is unreachable, so that it can reattach it once the connection is restored. However, Windows doesn't inform of this instantly, and if SQL Server tries to access the database first, you can get into the situation that you describe. To prevent this from happening, there needs to be a reliable connection between the image and clone. Using a SAN for images and co-locating images with machines that will receive clones on the same LAN is recommended. / comments
Communication between the clone VHD and its parent image VHD is handled by the VHD driver and SMB over the underlying network, but the clone database appears to SQL Server as though it is on standa...
If the instance has recently been configured, then restarting SQL Clone Agent might be required to pick it up. Otherwise, when you are adding the instance manually, are you including the machine name when specifying the instance? The "SQL Server Instance Name" box should just contain the name of the instance, not the server as well. If you need to specify a port as well, you should be able to specify it as e.g.: INSTANCENAME,1234 / comments
If the instance has recently been configured, then restarting SQL Clone Agent might be required to pick it up.Otherwise, when you are adding the instance manually, are you including the machine nam...
You need to have SQL Clone Agent installed on each machine where you want to create image and/or clones (since it needs to work with virtual disks and potentially the Shadow Copy service). Is the staging instance on a different machine to the dev server? Installing a copy of the Agent there should allow Clone to work with that instance if so. / comments
You need to have SQL Clone Agent installed on each machine where you want to create image and/or clones (since it needs to work with virtual disks and potentially the Shadow Copy service). Is the s...
Wait-SqlCloneOperation should throw the relevant error from the create/delete operation rather than "A task was canceled", e.g. [image] Are you seeing an error in the SQL Clone Server or Agent logs? Would you be able to share the relevant part of your PowerShell script? / comments
Wait-SqlCloneOperation should throw the relevant error from the create/delete operation rather than "A task was canceled", e.g.Are you seeing an error in the SQL Clone Server or Agent logs? Would y...
The PowerShell cmdlets are an alternative interface to the web UI, and so their job is just to send requests over HTTP to the SQL Clone Server backend. If the server returned an exception, that ought to be thrown by the cmdlet, and if you use the Wait-SqlCloneOperation cmdlet after starting a create/remove operation, it will throw any exception that occurred during the creation/deletion of an image/clone. If an unhandled exception was thrown in the Server or Agent, it should be logged in the relevant log files, as described here: https://documentation.red-gate.com/clone2/troubleshooting/log-locations Given that you're seeing "A task was canceled", particularly with Connect-SqlClone which only does a very simple handshake, I wonder whether this might actually be a timeout occurring when the cmdlet is trying to communicate with SQL Clone Server? / comments
The PowerShell cmdlets are an alternative interface to the web UI, and so their job is just to send requests over HTTP to the SQL Clone Server backend. If the server returned an exception, that oug...
Hi, hopefully you've resolved your problem, but this is a problem that we see if the login being used by the SQL Clone Agent doesn't have sysadmin privileges when creating images from backup. The backup path needs to be one which can be restored by the instance of SQL Server that you're using. UNC paths should work, but note that the account being used to access the backup is the account that the SQL Server service is running as in this case, not e.g. the SQL Clone Agent service's account. / comments
Hi, hopefully you've resolved your problem, but this is a problem that we see if the login being used by the SQL Clone Agent doesn't have sysadmin privileges when creating images from backup.The ba...
Hi! This error occurs because your agent machine has an old version of Newtonsoft.Json.dll in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). The .NET runtime loads this preferentially over the DLL shipped with SQL Clone, and this version doesn't support deserialization of IReadOnlyCollection. This DLL will have been added to the GAC by another product. We've heard this problem a few times, but we're not sure which software might be responsible - any suggestions you might be able to give would be useful! This could be resolved either by removing this DLL from the GAC so that the version we ship is loaded (although this may affect the software that installed it there) or updating the version in the GAC to at least version 8.0.2. / comments
Hi! This error occurs because your agent machine has an old version of Newtonsoft.Json.dll in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). The .NET runtime loads this preferentially over the DLL shipped with S...