Apr 30

ADMIN

How to migrate your server – with VMWare

On 04-30-2019

While you expect your computer hardware to operate effectively, year after year, they are going to become old over time and this includes your servers. Where you have been hosting several servers on a single hardware using VMWare, and it is one of the servers that becomes old, perhaps beginning to fail, migration to a new server can become difficult and a challenging task.

There are two primary difficulties with managing your migration tasks; first, you may have custom software that requires migration and second; all of your data must be migrated from your old server to a new model.

There are two main approaches to solving this problem. The first option is to install all of the third-party software on the new server, deploy your custom software and then migrate the data. Alternately, you can replicate all of the software and data on the server.

VMWare provides an efficient and effective solution for you to be able to replicate the data on your aging server, providing the server is already hosted on VMWare.

An alternative is to consider Amazon hosting which provides easy replication of your software and data to the new server.

The first approach is excellent if you are up grading third-party software at the same time. This includes upgrading to the latest version of IIS, tomcat, SQL server and others.

Moving to a new server does bring the latest software to your system, but it requires a lot of work, documentation and planning. You will be creating a new environment on the developer’s machine, work can be tested and any bugs fixed so you can remove or replace any depreciated APIs.

Any custom software can easily be updated to the most up-to-date version. The initial dataset can then be migrated and tested before you cut off the old server and restore the very latest backup of your data. Should you fail to cut off the old server, data may continue to be added to the failing server.

Whenever migration system that you choose to use, you must be aware that there will be a degree of downtime whenever the switchover occurs.

Where possible, master and slave configuration is completed so that your data from the old server and the new server remain perfectly in sync until all the features are tested on your new server.

There are several factors which need to be planned because server migration is not an easy task, but is required to be completed successfully.

Our experience when dealing with server migration includes nine years of software being hosted on a server, and after development for a different application, we completely understand all that is necessary for real migration, particularly where there are multiple servers involved and multiple customer software applications.

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