Server Migration: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

Discover the essential steps you might want to take to make sure your next server migration is successful!

As your web sites and applications grow, you’ll reach an inevitable crossroads where you’ll have to undertake a server migration. The next step-by-step guide can have your team well-prepared for the whole process – from migration day and beyond.

Server migration is the term used to explain copying or moving critical data from one server to a different, in addition to configuring that concentrate on server to interchange the primary. Within the context of website hosting, server migrations might revolve around establishing web server and database software, copying over web sites and their configurations, or changing DNS parameters to direct visitors to the brand new goal server.

When IT professionals discuss migrating hosts, they’re referring to the motion of migrating data from one server to a different. The method typically involves one or two servers, depending upon the host server’s configuration.

If a bunch server is partitioned into several virtual servers or containers, the source host and the destination host will exist throughout the same machine. This implies they’ll only require one server. Then again, if data is being migrated to a destination host on a completely different physical machine, the host migration would happen across two separate servers.

A typical server migration can take anywhere from half-hour to three hours. It’s because the time spent migrating servers will depend heavily on the quantity of knowledge transferred. Servers only have a certain quantity of bandwidth to accommodate tasks like these. As you increase the variety of files and applications being migrated, the method will take up more of the server’s bandwidth – ultimately taking longer to finish.

Several possible scenarios might make a server migration crucial. Organizations may migrate to:

1. Reap the benefits of recent technology or higher services, or be sure that the operating system (OS) and the hardware the brand new technology relies on not sleep so far.
2. Move to the cloud for increased flexibility or scalability.
3. To economize and consolidate hosting – reducing CapEx.
4. Replace aging infrastructure at the top of its lifecycle.
5. To expand and distribute hosting to assist reduce load at a single point and achieve high availability.

Migrating servers generally is a tricky process and must be handled with the utmost care. You can sink hours of time, effort, and money right into a migration, only to seek out yourself on the unsuitable server solution, which could lead to significant downtime and profit loss. 

It takes considerable planning and forethought to migrate data from one server to a different with none major hiccups. In any case, on-average downtime can cost an enterprise $686,000 an hour, so a successful server migration is crucial to the health of your organization.

Although server migrations are quite common, essentially the most experienced IT professionals get nervous when it’s time to initiate the server migration steps. With so many moving parts, it is rather easy – and quite common – for migrations to cause at the least a little bit anxiety.

Alleviate a few of that tension by planning ahead for the migration. Instructing your team to begin fascinated about data migrations early is critical for ensuring smooth, fast migrations that deliver the intended advantages without causing headaches along the way in which.

While a server migration checklist is vital to have, moving to a brand new environment is a fancy procedure. Even deciding what belongs on the list requires careful consideration. A clean data migration plan requires extensive system exploration and preparation by the corporate’s IT personnel, but even after essentially the most diligent preparation, surprises are possible. The steps that need the eye of your IT teams or devour a considerable amount of bandwidth must be rigorously scheduled.

Organizations that don’t leave an extended enough lead time for his or her migration project often find that they experience business disruptions or unexpected costs, even in the event that they do the whole lot else right.”

An entire and accurate picture of your existing infrastructure – including all data, hardware, software, and network components – is crucial for successful data migration. Before the migration even begins, your IT staff should conduct a whole documentation of your infrastructure. It will function your “blueprint” to properly construct your recent environment and avoid missing any crucial details or files when the migration is performed.

This roadmap of your organization’s IT infrastructure also informs the remainder of the planning process. Performing an intensive discovery also can have the additional advantage of uncovering potential future problems, like forgotten web applications running an unsupported scripting language or broken URL links. Preparation takes many forms beyond the initial exploration phase, including scheduling, communicating with staff, and technical measures corresponding to updating the LAMP stack if crucial, together with code and plugins.

As we mentioned, a whole and successful server migration consists of several steps. Those quite a few steps crucial when migrating servers are likely to fall into one in every of five primary categories that make up the overarching migration process.

Understanding how these broader server migration steps fit together and what’s included in each is critical to developing your exact strategy in the longer term.

In the only terms, consider a server migration as moving from one home to a different. If you need to bring all your possessions with you, your recent home must have enough space, right? And, in case you are used to having a double sink vanity in your bathroom, for instance, it’s possible you’ll want the identical features in your recent home.

Migrating servers could be very similar. All of the information associated together with your website and applications needs to suit properly in your recent server. Consequently,it’s essential to make sure that your recent server is appropriately sized and configured for any incoming data and digital assets. It’s also essential to ensure that mission-critical services and packages that your sites rely upon are installed and available in the brand new environment.

• What’s your organization’s planned growth over the subsequent five years, and what infrastructure changes will this require?
• Are all the suitable parties involved or informed of the planned server migration? Take into consideration site editors, administrators, developers, visitors or end-users, and your hosting provider(s).

TIP: Construct in roughly 20% extra space for storing when migrating. In the course of the migration, you’ll need a little bit extra room to unpack and install the information that’s being migrated, and you want some room to accommodate future growth as well.

The strategy of ensuring all data is accounted for before the migration (and properly installed after) is of critical importance. Losing even a tiny fraction of your data in transition, corresponding to one CSS file or connection string, can impact the performance of your entire site or application.

We recommend spending a while before the migration paying attention to what parts of your site are critical and what parts interact with or engage with other services. For instance, plugins and themes that affect multiple pages must be checked each before and after migration to make sure an identical functionality.

• What’s the standard of your data in your old server? Are there plenty of static files or dynamic databases?
• Do you might have a knowledge governance plan in place to make sure measurement, tracking, and higher decision-making in the course of the migration process?

Data transfer is usually essentially the most time-consuming a part of the migration. Once you might have prepared your recent server and properly secured all data, you’re finally ready to begin the transfer.

The bandwidth available between your old server and the brand new server (or between your old hosting provider and your recent hosting provider) essentially serves because the conduit for the migration. The more bandwidth you might have, the faster the information could be migrated, and the less downtime you’ll have to perform the server migration.

• Are all parties on the identical page regarding when data transfer will occur?
• Is there a transparent POC at your old hosting provider and your recent hosting provider?
• Are there any major initiatives or high-traffic events planned during or across the planned migration timelines?

TIP: Let anyone with access to the location know when the migration goes to occur and the way long it is anticipated to take. Putting a “freeze” on any web sites or applications will higher be sure that no recent content or data is lost in the course of the migration.

When you’ve actually migrated the information from one server to a different, it’s time for testing. Checking for full functionality and complete data transfer could also be time-consuming and cumbersome, but that’s time well spent to forestall discovering a problem at a much later date.

Since testing is often one in every of the server migration steps where surprises are more than likely, the time spent during this phase can vary significantly. Organizations often find that leaving an adequate period of time to completely complete the testing process is way easier if planned well prematurely.

Conducting rigorous testing is how organizations discover unanticipated issues, evaluate the effectiveness of their issue resolution strategies, and make sure the main points of how running internal systems in the brand new environment will look.

Finally, documenting how you’ll perform testing post-migration is as essential as any of the opposite steps on the server migration checklist. Accurate testing and evaluation ensure quality assurance, quality control, and guarantee process improvement from one migration to the subsequent.

• Have you ever verified appropriate request responses for APIs between applications and servers?
• In multi-server setups, are private and non-private traffic moving along the suitable networks?
• Are your site(s) or application(s) performing as expected?

TIP: Reference your previous site and server in the course of the testing process to see if anything looks off or incomplete. As long as the prior server was functional, it might probably provide an excellent roadmap for what your website should appear like in its youth on the brand new server. Sometimes, server migrations present excellent opportunities for uncovering existing site issues!

Now that you simply’ve migrated all your data, applications, and web sites to your recent server and performed sufficient testing, it’s time to switch your DNS. This switch is crucial because it directs traffic from the old server to the brand new infrastructure.

Pointing your server at a brand new DNS is definitely a comparatively easy process. The steps are straightforward, but doing them incorrectly may affect your site’s performance. We advise that you simply make your DNS switch during off-peak usage hours. The nighttime, weekends, or holidays typically work best.

• Have you ever double-checked there are not any business-critical events in the subsequent 72 hours following “go live?”
• Are all parties clear on their duties for the “go live” event?
• Do you might have a backup, reversion, or correction plan in case something goes unsuitable?

Are you wondering what to do together with your previous server now that it’s not in use? Our suggestion is to leave the old server lively for at the least every week or two as a degree of reference and fallback option within the event an unknown problem rears its head. Leaving your old server running for a transition period offers excellent protection against essentially the most unexpected issues.

Avoid the next during server migrations:

• Avoid scheduling a move immediately before a critical period for your enterprise, corresponding to Black Friday for a web-based retailer, to forestall a situation where an issue must be fixed in an unrealistic timeframe – turning it into a significant disruption.
• Migrations should generally be performed during off-hours or times when a minimal amount of business is anticipated. This reduces the possibilities of disruption, allows the IT team to focus solely on the migration, and prevents the legacy environment from being overwhelmed or the network from becoming saturated.
• Avoid starting a migration until the exploration period is complete. An incomplete exploration is one in every of the most important sources of preventable problems in migration projects of every kind. It might be a lengthy process, however the time invested upfront will prevent and your team countless headaches in the long term.
• Notify staff outside of the migration team concerning the migration. This includes migration timelines, the changes expected to occur, and responsibilities, if any, that could be included as a part of the project. You might have to distribute documentation to tell your staff or have a window of time by which IT personnel can assist end users with the initial set-up process.

Most service providers can address a big pain point for his or her potential customers by offering to assist with migrations. Nonetheless, not all hosts have the mixture of customer migration skills and motivation to follow through in a way that makes the experience as smooth as possible.

The necessities for migrations are significantly different depending on what’s being migrated and the environments involved. Things can get quite complicated depending on the dimensions of your organization and infrastructure.

As we previously wrote about migrating data between cPanel servers, service compatibility is the true magic of migrations. The magic spells, on this case, are the configurations and mixtures of versions which is able to work together.”

In the invention and documentation portion of the method, your web hosts’ migration veterans can work together with your internal IT administrators to ensure that every one relevant information is identified from the start. Now, your provider knows exactly what to search for. Your hosting provider also can help estimate how long a few of the steps will take, including the ultimate move.

Vital details about how a specific environment runs, corresponding to ensuring quorum is established in a server cluster, could also be obvious to migration experts but not so clear to in-house IT staff during a significant operation. After helping organizations through many migrations, service providers can anticipate a few of the questions IT teams are prone to be asked by non-IT staff. A service provider’s experience from migrating countless customers is only a fraction of the advantages organizations can experience by partnering with an authority.

Crafting a brand new environment to suit your enterprise’s needs is difficult. Even when you’ve accomplished an intensive discovery, guidance from professionals who’ve detailed knowledge of all of the components of the possible recent environment could be invaluable. Likewise, the experience of experts aware of storage and networking, your operating system, and the actual systems involved in either side of the migration can all be precious resources in the course of the data migration process.

A service provider with extensive experience walking customers through various migrations could be a useful asset. From exploration and making a project plan through testing and execution, there are many potentially expensive pitfalls that organizations can avoid with the suitable help.

Server migrations are easy to grasp but often complex to execute. The overarching concepts that make up a successful migration mean anyone can do them. The main points of every step on the server migration checklist, while often quite a few, should not necessarily complex. Among the best things you’ll be able to do to make sure a successful and complete server migration is to interact experts who know the trail and may guide you on the journey.

Here at Liquid Web, our Most Helpful Humans in Hosting™ perform hundreds of migrations yearly and understand what roadblocks and pitfalls to avoid. For those who are considering migrating to a brand new server, get in contact now. 

We could be joyful to debate what goes right into a successful dedicated server hosting migration and help architect the suitable infrastructure on your needs. Migrating to a brand new server is an enormous decision and a process best undertaken with a trusted partner by your side.