Both Server and Agent require a 64-bit operating system.

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.

Requires:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 7 SP1 or later, excluding Windows 8.0
  • This will change in the next major release of SQL Clone - please check Prepare for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 end of support for SQL Clone for more information.
• Access to a SQL Server (2008 or later, or Azure SQL Database) for storing configuration data
  • 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
• If using Windows 7 SP1, installation upgrades security defaults to match later Windows versions:
  • TLS 1.2 enabled (part of installation)
  • SendTrustedIssuerList disabled (part of installation)
• If using Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016, installation allows Edge to access sites hosted on the local machine:
  • LoopbackExempt permission added to Edge (part of installation)

• 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.

Requires:

• Minimum (limited to <1.8TB images): Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7
  • This will change in the next major release of SQL Clone - please check Prepare for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 end of support for SQL Clone for more information.
• Recommended (limited to <64TB images): At least Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8.1
• SQL Server 2008 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.

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 or IE11

Offline Installation

For a computer not connected to the internet, you will need to manually install these pre-requisites before running the SQL Clone Agent installer

• .NET Framework 4.7.2

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.

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.