Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Replace disks with little downtime

[jpeacock]

So, here's my scenario. I colo a 1U machine with 2-36gig drives. They're not in RAID, and I have it set to rsync backups to a remote machine on a regular schedule. I have another remote machine functioning as a secondary DNS. Neither of these 2 are on a large upstream pipe. I just bought 2-147gig drives that I'd like to replace the 36g's with. How does this sound for a scenario to accomplish this with little downtime (pre-pardon my noob'ish ways):

1. Do a complete rsync of the filesystem to my remote machine as well as sync the mysql db's (to 1 remote drive).
2. Pop that single rsync'd drive into an external enclosure.
3. Travel to datacenter, once there, plug external drive into laptop and start up a VM that boots off of that drive.
4. Sync again so external drive has the most up-to-date data.
5. Change over IP's from colo to VM on laptop.
6. Shutdown and swap out drives in colo'd box with the new ones.
7. Setup new drives as RAID 1, install OS, then rsync filesystem over from laptop to new drives in colo'd box.
8. Change back IP's.

What am I missing, or is there an easier way without a 2nd colo/dedicated server? Currently, the colo'd machine is using about 1.3Mbit/sec outbound and it's running a low load.

Thoughts?

[ServerSurgeon George]

Can't you plug in the 2 new HDDs into the server and do a rsync without using a second server?

Then just switch them with the old ones after the sync is finished

[Dave Parish]

Just image both of the drives or ghost them.

[uptimearchive]

well rsync is an option, how long is the time to complete a sync?

You could always usee dd and seqentially copy the data from one drive to the next, it will be very fast, no traversing the filesystem...you should get near the maximum possible performance of the drives... is it ext3? you can modify the partition/table and extend the filesystem with little risk.

Its an alternative to consider.

[jpeacock]

Originally Posted by uptimearchive

well rsync is an option, how long is the time to complete a sync?

You could always usee dd and seqentially copy the data from one drive to the next, it will be very fast, no traversing the filesystem...you should get near the maximum possible performance of the drives... is it ext3? you can modify the partition/table and extend the filesystem with little risk.

Its an alternative to consider.

Can you dd a booted drive to another drive, or should I be booting from a gparted cd or such?

[uptimearchive]

you definetly don't want to do it on a mounted drive, you will have issues. You could remount everything read-only while you did it, but that might defeat the purpose. The whole idea with DD is, it should be able to copy very fast, so you can shut the unit down, boot from a centos cd or whatever and do the copy.

Do you have simular hardware you could do a test scenerio on? just so you can see it works well, plus get an idea how long it would take.