Upgrading to new server

[badkneecap]

I'm in the process of upgrading my server with Plesk 7.5 to a new server. My plan was to install Plesk 7.5, run the backup utility, copy over the backup file, and then restore it on the new server.

1) Can it be this simple? I'm sure I need to transfer the license keys and stuff over. Will the backup contain the keys, or do I need to do this before I restore? Is there a way I can get this from "My.plesk.com"?

2) When I configured the IP addresses for my current configuration, I used the server's primary IP address. My mistake, and I should have known better. So now, when I move the sites over, I need to use a new shared IP address. The problem is that the DNS is all pointing to the old server. My plan was to restore the sites on the new server, and then change the DNS on the old server to point to the new IP server address(es) and then update the domain registrars to point to the new server. So, eventually the domain names would resolve to the new server and I could turn off the old server after a few days when they all propagated. Is this the right way to do it? Do I change the DNS individually for each site on the old server to point to the new server, or is there a easier way to do it all at once?

3) Finally, I just found out that 7.6 is out. What's the best time to upgrade, before or after the move?

Thanks.

- PR

 

[hostex]

We are doing the same thing. Did you (or anyone) find/know of a way to bulk change the DNS so domains on the old server so they point to the new servers IP's?

We are using MS DNS with Plesk 7.5.6

Thanks!

 

[badkneecap]

We didn't do a bulk change, we did them manually. First, we configured the new server, backed up the configuration copied it to the new server and then restored. What was cool was that the DNS configuration pointed back to the old server IP addresses. Then, we just went to each domain and changed the nameservers to the new IP address. We also changed the TTL to 5 minutes so the final change would be minimal. Then, when all the nameservers were updated and we waited enought time for them to propagate, we stopped the old server sites, backed up the data, moved over, restored, and then changed the IP addresses to the new IP addresses and started everything up. I'm paraphrasing, so don't take what I just said literally, but I think you get the picture of what we did.

If you're looking to somehow change all the domains to the new IP addresses, I'm not sure if this answered your question. We don't have that many domains hosted, so we was feasible to manually update each domain. Also, there was a function to change all the nameserver at one time with my registrar, so we could have gone that route as well. We use the ns and ns2 for each domain, so we were not able to do it in bulk.

- PR

 

[hostex]

Thanks! Very interesting way to do this.

We had a lot of data so we did not want to do a copy twice. For anyone else that needs to do a move Plesk support gave us an easy way to do this. Here was their response.

"Make dns zone for each domain slave as primary name server set your new server. You can do it manually through Plesk CP or using domain.exe utility (see link below
http://download1.swsoft.com/Plesk/P...sk-7.5-win-advanced-features-manual/11979.htm"

Just make sure to set the TTY on the old server to a low number 24 hours before this is done. There are a few threads in the forum that explain how to do this.

Cheers