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CloudAccess.net Server Migrations Explained

By now you’ve probably noticed our new Cloud Control Panel™(CCP) with a much improved user interface and many new features that improve the user experience. We rolled out the CCP a few weeks ago, and there are many visible changes on the front end, but do you know what goes on in the background - at the server level - to make these features possible?

server

We’re really proud of the CCP and all the functionality it offers our clients. Our design and development teams have done a great job giving our clients more options and improving the user experience. The server administrators also do a lot to keep your site online while our team rolls out new features like these. There are many things involved in the process, but the one that I want to highlight in this blog is server migrations.

In it’s simplest form, a server migration is when data is moved from one server to another. The migration may take place for security reasons or to upgrade equipment. Because data may become temporarily unavailable during a server migration, we have a plan in place to limit downtime as we move clients around our platform. Our plan is detailed below:

  1. Prepare the next generation servers
    1. We apply one uniform setup configuration (server template) for all servers. The set-up includes the following:
      1. Intel Xeon processors (or better)
      2. 15K SAS drives in a RAID 1+0 with 256k stripe (disk configuration)
      3. 100GB SSD dedicated for the MySQL database.
      4. Servers will have 64GB of RAM - double the GB as previous servers) - giving clients more memory for PHP applications.
    2. Once the set up is complete, we boot the system in a diskless state (PXE boot). What this means is that uniform server template is provisioned from one server to another allowing for a completely remote server build. We slide in a bare metal box and install the operating system with little help from our Datacenter team.
  2. Migrate client sites
    1. We prepare a list of customers to migrate. We migrate customers in batches and we organize the batches using the following criteria: 
      1. Customers using our domain name servers (migrated first because our migration process automatically updates their A record)
      2. Customers using other domain name servers (migrated second)
      3. Customers with missing name server records (migrated third)
    2. During the migration process we setup an Apache proxy configuration for your vHost forwarding traffic trying to reach your domain name to the new server. We do this because DNS changes can take some to complete. This keeps your site online until the A record is changed or the IP is moved to the new server.
    3. Migration cleanup process
      1. Move any IPs used by our clients to the new server
      2. Take one more backup of the server
      3. Format the drives

Our ultimate goal is twofold: we want to continually offer our clients better servers and we aim to limit downtime in the migration process. As in any process, there are bugs discovered along the way and we adjust accordingly. We will continue to perfect our processes of moving applications around our cloud hosting environment. Soon you’ll be able to move sites from data center to data center or load balance your Joomla Instances with a click of a button. The ideas is to give the end user the freedom to move their Instances around the cloud to scale without needing the help of a server administrator. Cloudaccess.net stirves to provide the best customer service and the highest server reliability in the industry. Thank you for choosing CloudAccess.net.

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