Info for migrating from cPanel to VM

Hi Steve,

First off, a buddy of mine recently migrated 25 servers from cPanel and he said it worked great (his exact words were "it worked without a hitch").

Outside of that -- I know I'm skipping a few questions here, but my recommendation is that when you're dealing with production sites, you simply can't beat actually running the migration and knowing/experiencing exactly what you'll run into.

What you might consider doing is setting up a Linux server in the free VMware Server software (I have one running on my desktop, for example) -- and after doing a fresh install of your distro, run the Virtualmin install script, and then practice the migration.

Then you don't have to rely on the experiences of others for your production data, you can say to these folks "I ran the migration, we saw these issues, and it takes 1 hour to complete".

You'd also be able to show it to them, so they don't have to try and read the Russian on the demo site ;-)

The migration would be done using the cPanel backup tarballs. There some info on that here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/id,virtualmin_for_cpanel_users/

I hope that helps... have a good one!
-Eric

Hey Steve,

I'll chime in, but hope others will, as well.

<div class='quote'>2) All sites have their own SSL Certs, does the migration handle this?</div>

Yes, they should. Let us know if they don't, and we'll fix it.

<div class='quote'>3) They are worried about current customers not liking or being able to figure out the VM interface. (I have a meeting with them to show them the interface of my box). They did not like the VM demo site, which doesn't seem to be getting reset as its currently (I just checked) all in Russian.</div>

We can't change what they're used to, but I can fix the demo site. ;-)

It is a very real problem that our problem set is complicated...and when it comes to complicated software, &quot;intuitive&quot; means &quot;what I'm used to&quot;. We're confident that if people spend some time learning Virtualmin, they'll like it better than cPanel. But many folks don't want to expend that effort and time--and I can't blame them. Sometimes what you know is better for you than a better product that you don't know.

What we can say with absolute confidence is that Virtualmin Professional is the most powerful tool on the market. There is simply nothing else that does more. But, if someone only needs what a competing product does, and they're familiar with it, then maybe Virtualmin is not the right solution for them.

<div class='quote'>4) How does the migration handle things like installed software/apps on the cPanel server?</div>

This one is tricky. It brings them over, and they should continue to work with little or no modification, but it doesn't bring them under control of the Virtualmin Install Scripts interface (which is bug-like, but hard to avoid, since it's impossible for us to know exactly how it was installed and whether we can safely pretend like it was installed &quot;our way&quot;).

<div class='quote'>5) How hard is the migration process (probably related to #1)</div>

It <i>should</i> be about like restoring a backup. cPanel migrations are the best tested, and so are expected to be pretty reliable. We welcome bug reports, and Jamie fixes problems pretty fast...usually in time for you to make use of the fixed version for the rest of your restores.

<div class='quote'>6) Is there anything special (tips/tricks) they need to know going into the migration.</div>

Plan it just like you would any other system migration: shorten DNS TTL, so when you change IPs it'll take up faster, plan to add redirect rules in Apache if a few hours of unavailability due to DNS propagation is unacceptable, be sure to test the new system before relying on it.

<div class='quote'>7) Is there any 'dry run' or 'emulation' test they can run to see how VM will handle the migration.</div>

Just run it and test it. If it fails, delete the virtual server and try it again, after talking to us about any errors or problems. You've got to plan for some time for testing anyway before you flip the switch--even if you were going from one machine to an exactly identical one, you still need to test to be sure all necessary data has come over correctly. Moving from one system to a pretty distinctly different one means you have to test a little more heavily and expect more issues to be resolved. But it shouldn't be too bad--cPanel is a more limited system than Virtualmin, and so the differences you'll generally see are just more capabilities and somewhat more modern practices (our group policy, for example, is a bit more modern than cPanel and takes advantage of modern Linux systems), but functionality should generally go in the &quot;more&quot; direction rather than &quot;less&quot;.

<div class='quote'>8) Do Joe/Jamie help if there is a problem? They have always been good to ME when there was a problem with my vm.</div>

Let's just say you've never received special treatment just because we've known you for a while. How we've treated you is about how everyone is treated. We try pretty hard to make sure everybody is happy with our products. If they aren't, we apologize for wasting their time, and give them a full refund.

<div class='quote'>9) How long will it take for the migration?</div>

That depends on so many factors that it's impossible to say.

For 50 sites plan for 10 days, and be pleasantly surprised when it's done in a couple of afternoons.

I left off the last two. Oops.

<div class='quote'>10) How does the migration work? Do they point it to their cPanel, work off of a backup or ?</div>

Migrations are done using cPanel backups.

<div class='quote'>11) They have a target time period of 2 hours to make the transition (50 sites), is this feasible?</div>

No. But it wouldn't be feasible going from cPanel to cPanel, either. It just takes longer than that to move from one server to another...dealing with IP addresses, testing of applications, etc.

The raw time of migrating could certainly be that short, if the data is small--but testing takes human time, and making sure DNS does the right thing is also tricky. And, of course, if you really want to insure uptime, you need a redirect on all of the old sites to insure that they get redirected to the new, even if a client gets the old DNS information.

<div class='quote'>They are tired of cPanel and its problems. On another note, the data center I currently use (I just found this out) no longer supports cPanel and have moved to VM!!! Awesome job guys! This data center is one of the best in Portland, OR. and hosts many of the downtown businesses.</div>

Awesome! I'm always happy to hear it. If they aren't already in our partner program, be sure to let them know that we'd be happy to set them up. Even if they're generally using Virtualmin GPL (which we're totally happy about) being able to sell upward to Professional for their customers that need it might be a nice additional revenue stream.