Requirements & Limitations

System Requirements

• Windows Server 2008 R2 or later, or Windows 7 or later (64-bit versions only)
• PowerShell 4 or later, and .NET 4.5.2 or later (Windows Management Framework 4.0 will install both https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=40855)
• SQL Server 2008 or later (Express edition is sufficient)
• During install, the account chosen requires
  • Local admin privileges in order to use the Virtual Disk Service
  • Read/write access to network locations where snapshots will be shared
  • If you wish to use Windows Authentication for SQL Server:
    • CREATE DATABASE on local SQL Server instances where clones will be created
    • VIEW ANY DEFINITION on local SQL Server instances snapshots will be created from

Limitations

At the moment, the SQL Clone Technical Preview has the following limitations:

• The maximum size of a snapshot (and therefore the maximum database size for cloning) is 2TB
• Databases with filestream and memory-optimized filegroups cannot be snapshotted
• Clones cannot be created as part of a cluster
• There is no security mechanism to restrict access to operations. If you can run the UI or PowerShell on a machine with SQL Clone installed, you can perform all operations.
• When used on multiple machines, SQL Clone knows about shared snapshots, but not about clones created on other machines. A shared snapshot will show the number of clones it has on the connected instance only. 
• CLR assemblies are not ported to other machines by SQL Clone. These may have to be registered in a post-clone step if they are required.
• SQL Clone does not currently support differential backups.
• Creating a snapshot from a multi-database backup only creates a snapshot for the first database in the backup.

 If one of these limitations or anything else is blocking your use of the tool, please contact us: sqlclone@red-gate.com.