[Users] Local VM for testing production VM

[Jeffrey Walton]

Hi Everyone,

We are a free/open source project. We rent a OpenVZ-based CentOS 7 VM
for a website and wiki. We need to get off PHP 5.4 and MediaWiki 1.26.

I'm setting up a local VM to test the migration of the production VM.
I have a few questions.

1. Is there a way to clone a rented VM over SSH?
    - an exact image would be great to use for testing

2. Is there a tool which duplicates a configuration?
    - we would like to use the production config for the local config

3. What are the interesting items in a config for testing?
   - high level bullet points

For question (1), we don't get a lot of support from the provider. We
mostly have to rely on things we can do at the user side of things.

My apologies for (3). I know it is a crummy question. We have an idea
we want the same repos and packages, but we are not sure what else may
contribute to the config in a significant way.

Jeff