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  1. #1
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Toronto, Canada
    Posts
    3

    Cloud to Cloud Migrations - How to deal with configs?

    Merry Christmas!

    I'm trying to do a large migration of 5 servers from Rackspace Cloud to Softlayer CloudLayer, and am wondering what the proper procedure for a task like this might be. Each server is different (one for www, one for MySQL, three for separate apps), and have different packages installed on them with unique configurations (i.e. Varnish, git, NodeJS, etc). They're all Ubuntu servers.

    Being my first time, I'd love to get some advice .

    It doesn't sound to be as simple as migrating everything under "/" from the old server to the new server. Anyone have any ideas as to what the correct procedure should be to get everything moved and working together at the new provider?

    Thanks!
    Donny

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Location
    Canada
    Posts
    938
    Normally best practice is to use chef or puppet to stand up another cluster with the appropriate configs and then migrate the data using rsync and mysql replication.

    If you're in a pinch and doing this the old fashioned way, dpkg -l , hand install the missing packages and then copy over /etc folders as needed. Then do the data migration as above.

  3. #3
    Best to use infrastructure automation tools like (chef, puppet, cfengine).

    If in a rush you can rsync all the old files over to say /var/tmp/oldhost and then copy files you need manually until you have a chance to get your infrastructure automation into place.

  4. #4
    How much data do you have?

    Typically, if it is a linux operating system like Ubuntu it can be done fairly easy with rsync and have an exclude file to ignore some OS files. Copy over all the configurations, packages/software, etc. Have had pretty good success in migrating linux machines using rsync without having to reconfigure everything.


    EDIT: Just noticed you said Ubuntu!
    Last edited by CloudVZ; 12-27-2013 at 11:59 PM.
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jun 2013
    Posts
    36
    If you are happy with the OS and build, then a better option may be a V2V copy. Just pickup the entire VM and copy it. At the destination end its little more than changing IP, hostname etc and you're done.

    It really does depend on what you want to achieve from a provider. Most Linux migrations we've done have involved an OS change, or a move from apache/mod-php to fastcgi/php-fpm so frankly its easier to just build new VMs and copy files/databases as others have described using rsync etc.

    Acronis is what we use to do full system copies. If your VM has had many hours of build time put into it and you don't fancy re-learning all the tweaks you made the first time around, a complete copy could be better.

    We had a customer who reckoned they had spent weeks getting their application to work on a vanilla server and wouldn't have endured a provider move if they had to go through that again. Moving a 60GB VM required just 45 minutes of downtime and as its the same machine, it worked perfectly after the move.

    You can also do a full copy followed by incremental copies. Typically used for large customers. We moved a 3TB customer from the USA to ourselves using this technique; trying to do a single full copy would have required a whole weekend outage I guess.

    The only thing which might be a stumbling block is that at the destination end you need the ability to create an empty VM with the acronis ISO mounted as a boot device. Worth a look though.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Nassau, The Bahamas
    Posts
    74
    Quote Originally Posted by donnyouyang View Post
    Merry Christmas!

    Being my first time, I'd love to get some advice .

    It doesn't sound to be as simple as migrating everything under "/" from the old server to the new server. Anyone have any ideas as to what the correct procedure should be to get everything moved and working together at the new provider?

    Thanks!
    Donny

    Best idea is to use a V2V migration tool. Ask your new hosting co if they can help you with it, they should be happy to do it.
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  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2000
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    134

    Thumbs up

    There is a fairly new approach appearing from a few vendors I really quite like, instead of trying to do v2v conversion, they analyse and extract the application and it's data from the underlying operating system, and then import it into a brand new VM, thus removing some of the headaches in traditional conversions.

    It also has the benefits of being able to p2v as well as p2v, and even upgrade operating systems etc as part of the upgrade.

    https://www.usharesoft.com/products/migration.html has more information.

    (Non needed disclaimer: I have no commercial interest in mentioning these guys apart from I think they are doing some cool stuff).

    Regards,

    Tony
    Founder & SVP Product
    Flexiant Ltd
    Simplifying the Cloud - Designed for Service Providers
    http://www.flexiant.com

  8. #8
    Hello,

    I have seen the usharesoft migration solution work and it is nice.

    In the open source world, maybe https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pysa/ is something to look at. It is developed by the guys behind Madeira Cloud.

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