We are considering purchasing a company that has 43 servers, most colo's and dedicated..some are virtual hosting customers. We need to move them to our NOC without downtime. Mix of NT and Linux. The virtual hosting customers are easy - not many and can be reproduced here - the colo's and ded servers present a diff't problem and unique challenge. Any ideas on moving them with zero downtime and without completely redundant servers? (Almost sounds like a a Marilyn Vos Savant question)

That's going to be a very difficult challenge, but I imagine someone has a solution.

Are you *physically* moving your dedicated servers or just shifting the stuff in the original boxes across? (I know you'd have to move your co-los..) If you have to do it physically I very much doubt you can avoid downtime, so you'd probably have to do it in the middle of night or similar and give everyone enough warning... (like a week or two at least).

I have no experience with NT Servers and this is a method I have heard about for *nix Servers. The person who used it said it worked beautifully. I will know in a week because I will be doing about 7 domains myself. :D

telnet into old server and from the root directory:

tar --create --verbose --file=pickaname.tar directoryname

To move to the other server:

ftp newipaddress

login

send pickaname.tar

It will transfer the file and give you all kinds of useful info to boot.

Now telnet into the new server and:

tar --extract --verbose --file=pickaname.tar

The verbose isn't really needed, it just gives you a warm fuzzy that the operation is taking place.