We have been hosting sites and email for over two years with a dedicated server. Not to long ago an opportunity became available for a server upgrade and we took it. Everyone was excited about the upgrade as it would give us a faster and more scalable hosting solution. It would not only be a hardware upgrade, but a software upgrade as well. This meant getting the latest version of PHP, Python, and MySQL which would increase our capabilities in development.
All sounds good... except for one critical factor: how on earth were we to get all our data from one server to the other? This was a rather hard question to answer. We had quite a few options ranging from manually moving everything over one by one, to rsyncing specific directories, or even using a migration manager. On our old server we were using Plesk 7.5.4 with RHEL 3, the new server had Plesk 8.1.0 with RHEL 4. We planned and planned, but it was hard to account for everything in a server move. There were to many unknowns for an action plan to be written successfully, so we started researching in an attempt to at least limit the number of unknowns.
I knew that the worst case scenario would be to manually move of all our data from one server to the other. With this in mind I started researching the built in Plesk migration manager. I was surprised by the lack of information online. There is documentation for it, but very little information on experiences using it. After reading what I could on the Plesk forums, we decided to do a test domain just to see how the migration manager worked. I broke up the information we found into the three categories below.
How does the Plesk migration manager work?
Most of the process is transparent. If you are planning a server move, here are some things you need to know before you begin. First, you only the migration manager installed on the new server you are migrating to. Second, make sure you have free disk space on the old server that you are migrating from. If you are currently using 30 gigs of disk space then you should have 30 gigs of disk space free. This is critical as the migration manager could fail when it runs out of disk space.
After those two steps are complete, run the migration manager from the new server. You will need your old server ip address and root login (or normal user with sudo password). The migration manager will install an agent through SSH on the old server using this information. After the agent installs, it will ask you some questions about the system to confirm what it found. Then it will ask if you want to move everything over or pick from a list. I highly suggest that you pick from a list and not move everything over at once. The agent will take the data/domains you selected and format them within the old server (this is why so much disk space is necessary).
After the data is formatted, the agent will move it to the new server and the domain/emails will show up in your domain list.
What will the Plesk migration manager move?
From our experience (Plesk 7.5.4 to Plesk 8.1.0), here is a list of things we know copied over:
- domains
- FTP information
- domain access information
- domain settings (PHP, Python, Webalizer, etc)
- all files/folders in httpdocs and httpsdocs
- subdomains
- FTP information
- subdomain access information
- subdomain settings (PHP, Python, etc)
- all files/folders in httpdocs and httpsdocs
- emails
- login information
- any emails on the old server
- email settings (auto notification, etc)
- disabled or enabled status per domain
- DNS
- subdomains and special entries
What will the Plesk migration manager not move?
From our experience (Plesk 7.5.4 to Plesk 8.1.0), here is a list of things we know did not copied over:
- SSL Certificates
- certian directories
- directories not created by plesk in the vhost root
- spam assassin (server level)
- white lists
- black lists
- but it will learn when emails are transfered with ****SPAM**** attached
- email (server level)
- white lists
- black lists
- email settings (relaying, letter size, etc)
- crontab
Hopefully this information will help if you ever need to migrate servers with plesk. The migration manager is constantly being updated, so this information is only accurate for plesk 8.1.0.
