Comment Re:Clone my car! (Score 1) 500
The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.
Exactly.
If the machine is in production it needs to be working. You don't have time to dig around and find the root cause. You need it to work. Now. If you've got a virtualized environment it is trivial to bring up a new VM, throw an image at it, and migrate the data.
Then you take your old, malfunctioning VM into a development environment and dig for the root cause, so that you don't see the same problem crop up on your new production machine.
I ditto this. Its really hard to troubleshoot a problem when users are ringing your phone continuously because a critical server is down. Much easier to pull it into dev and troubleshoot at your leisure. The key being going back to figure out the problem. Not just "forgetting" about it and moving on.