We have a sysadmin who is cloning one of our production servers, which is a VMWare VM. The total time to clone it seems to be about 2 hours. The server is still running (serving web apps) while he does the clone.
Obviously, things are changing on the server's hard drive and in memory during those two hours. How can we end up with a consistent copy of the machine? Or are we supposed to end up with an inconsistent copy?? Will we end up with a VM that partially resembles what the original VM looked like at 7:00am, another part of it reflects what the original looked like at 8:00am, etc.?
We're running VMWare vCenter Server 4.1, if that matters.