Hi! I have a multiserver setup based on CentOS 7, which was migrated from a single server CentOS 5 and ISPConfig 2 many years ago. Is there any way to migrate this setup to multiple servers using Ubuntu or Debian? I read that the Migration Toolkit can't do this automatically, but is there any guide for a manual migration? There aren't that many websites on the web server, but there are a few hundred GBs of mail messages on the mail server. How should I go about this? Thanks.
There may be different ways how to tackle this. How tech savy you'd say you are? If there are just a few accounts, I'd probably know what happened by doing it by hand and rsync the mails after I veryfied the used software and configuration matches + directory structure and user/groups. Not sure about the toolkit, not my area of knowledge - but no matter what you do, keep a backup, do a dry run and have a plan before doing the actual migration always. And inform your clients when you know what downtime can be expected you estimated from the dry run.
@ztk.me Thank you for your answer. I would say I'm not a beginner, I manage multiple Linux servers, but I'm not at all a guru. I feel more at home on RedHat distros, but Ubuntu seems easy enough. My main concern is that if I re-create all the e-mail accounts, I would need to set new passwords and help every user to set it up possibly on multiple devices, as this is a system used by my customers. I think I could probably try this: set up the new setup behind the curtains, rsync all the data, check configuration, permissions, directory structure, make sure everything works alright using a forced name resolution in the hosts file of my PC to point to the IP of the servers. I'd notify the clients that the migration process starts and if everything looks ok, I'd stop the network on the live servers, rsync again, change IPs on the servers and that should be it. Is there anything I'm missing? Thanks again.
Yes, you can do this with the Migration Toolkit. Not sure where you read that, as you can do this automatically using the Migration Tool. The steps are: 1) Set up your new Debian or Ubuntu based multiservers etup. 2) Run the Migration Tool on each node one after another, let it connect to the new master server, the tool will then ask you on which target node the configuration and data shall be migrated to.
@till Thank you very much, Till. That's really awesome news! I don't remember where I saw that I needed to stay on the same distro type. Thank you for the guide and also for this great piece of software that's ISPConfig. Everything looks brighter now
Thats the case when using ISPcopy for the migration and not the Migration Tool. ISPCopy is a special tool for moving a slave node to a new hardware while keeping it attached to the old master server. But when you make a new multiserver setup with new master, then you can use the Migration Tool, which supports that you change to a different OS.
