Dear sirs,
We are currently running virtualmin on a production system running as a production web server and Email server (postfix) system. We would like to shut down this server in the current data-center and move the data and the whole structure to a new hardware system in another data-center in a different IP of course. The whole job has to be done remotely. The hardware itself is not going to be moved. We are just changing data center providers.
We would like your help on the best way to achieve this. Please note that the current system is a production system and users are taking emails from it throughout the day, so a minimum interruption is what we want. Any link, proposal or details would be of immense help.
We are also willing to pay if you can perform the migration for us.
We thank you in advance for your time and help
Kind Regards Ioannis
Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Mon, 07/12/2010 - 10:03 Comment #1
Howdy -- migrations are actually fairly straight forward, and it's no problem to do it remotely.
What I'd suggest doing is setting up your new server in the new datacenter, and install Virtualmin onto it (the Virtualmin Pro license allows you to run the same license on both servers for circumstances such as migrations).
From there, generate backups of all your Virtual Servers on your existing system, copy them to the new server, and then import them. If you import all the files generated by the backup (including the virtualmin.tar.gz file), it'll import your Virtualmin settings as well as all your domains and their data.
Once you import them, I'd highly suggest testing your websites before going live to make sure they work as expected -- there's a few ways to do that, including using the Services -> Preview Website option.
Once you're confident things are working as expected, then you can make the new server live. That can typically be done by changing the IP addresses of your nameservers setup at your registrar.
That is, if all the domains on your server use ns1.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld as their nameservers, you would log into your domain name registrar, and update the IP addresses for those two nameservers to point to your new server.
While we can't perform the actual migration for you, we're happy to offer some advice and tips on how to do it.
If you decide you'd like something more hands on, we'd encourage you to submit your request into the "Jobs" section of the forums, there's some knowledgeable folks over there who you could hire to do the migration for you.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to let us know!
if I may, the migration is really simple as Eric described. Using the CLI to SCP and export/import domains will make it a breeze.
The hardest part (from experience) is the propagation of the domains as that you have usually no control over.
Clients may have domains registered not under your control and need to be adjusted at the respective registrars.
This needs to be timed together with switching IP for your own nameservers. Downtime however will occur, so you need to cummunicate this with your clients.
At that time you will also want to migrate incremental backups to have the most recent version of your clients websites and emails.
Submitted by angeloio on Mon, 07/12/2010 - 11:57 Comment #3
So many thanks guys !!! :-)
I will close this ticket now and hope that everything works as you described. My biggest concern are the clients emails (the actual data) that need to be transferred as well as the servers' configuration (some of them have been manually reconfigured to use for example different home dirs - e.g. apache uses /home as domain root instead of /var/www.
As long as data are transered everything should be fine.
If I run into problems I will come back to you :-)
Again so many thanks
Ioannis