SQL Clone 5

Both Server and Agent require a 64-bit operating system with .NET Framework 4.7.2 .

SQL Clone Server requirements

A single central server is required to use SQL Clone within an organization, it co-ordinates agents, and serves the SQL Clone web app.

Operating System (one of):
- Windows Server: Windows Server 2012 R2 or later
- Windows Desktop: Windows 8.1 or later
Recommended CPU: 4 core 2.0GHz or higher
Recommended RAM: 4GB or higher
Access to a SQL Server instance for storing configuration data
- SQL Clone's configuration database can be installed on SQL Server 2012 or later (cloud-managed databases are not supported)
- Windows Authentication is required
- An empty database, or CREATE ANY DATABASE permission on the server so that SQL Clone can create its configuration database
- At least SELECT/UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE/ALTER permissions on the configuration database
- This database will be used only for metadata, and generally is expected to be 1GB or less in size
By default the SQL Clone server web UI is served over HTTP and uses port 14145. To use HTTPS or a different port number follow the instructions on Configuring HTTPS and custom ports
Firewall must permit incoming connection to Port 14145 (or the custom configured port - see above) and port 14146

SQL Clone Agent requirements

An agent should be installed on the same machine as any SQL Server you wish SQL Clone to use as a source of images, destination for clones, or temporary scratch space for restoring backups.

Operating System (one of):
- Windows Server: Windows Server 2012 R2 or later
- Windows Desktop: Windows 8.1 or later
Recommended CPU: 4 core 2.0GHz or higher
Recommended RAM: 4GB or higher
SQL Server 2012 or later (Express edition is sufficient - though Clones will not circumvent SQL Server Express' 10GB database size limit)
.NET Framework 4.7.2 or later (part of installation)
Outbound connection to remote (SQL Clone Server) port 14146 must be allowed
The Volume Shadow Copy Service must be available in order to make images from SQL Server instances:
- The 'Volume Shadow Copy' service must be enabled
- A shadow copy provider must also be enabled. The default software provider service is called ' Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider', but you may have a different provider (for example, if you're using a storage device that provides hardware support for shadow copying)

This requires a Windows user account which has:

Local admin privileges in order to use the Virtual Disk Service
Read/write and change permissions access to network locations where images will be stored

On local SQL Server instances where clones will be created or dropped, or images created from, the agent will also need a login with:

Membership in the sysadmin fixed server role

This can be either a Windows login tied to the agent's Windows account, or a SQL Server login.

If you want to use a SQL Server login, you will need to provide the username and password (once) when creating an image or clone with the instance.

The agent must have enough disk space to store the clones, bearing in mind that they may grow over time.

SQL Clone PowerShell cmdlets requirements

The SQL Clone PowerShell cmdlets, which you can download from the web client, have the following requirements:

Requires:

PowerShell 3.0 (or higher)
TLS 1.2 (or higher) - Older versions have been deprecated by Microsoft and cause problems when running SQL Clone operations. Please check this page for instructions on how to migrate.

Browser requirements

The latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge

Image storage requirements

SQL Clone requires a network share to store database images so they can be accessed by multiple users.

An image will be roughly the same size as the original database. The file share must have sufficient disk space available to store it.

A single image cannot be split across multiple disks (e.g. you cannot split a 20TB image into four smaller 5TB parts) but you can store different image files in different file shares.

Since clones will talk directly to the image, there should be a high bandwidth and low latency connection between the machine hosting the clone and the machine hosting the image files.

If a file share has a limitation on the maximum size of a single file, it must be greater than the size of any image you are going to create. For example, a file share hosted in Azure has a maximum file size of 4 TiB so it would be impossible for SQL Clone to store an image there that is larger than 4 TiB on disk.

For more instructions on how to set up SQL Clone see Getting ready for SQL Clone.

If any of these requirements are problematic for you (or your organization), we'd love to hear about it by email.