Print

[martin]

We had a scheduled a migration of an important server used to host Virtuozzo based Virtual Private Servers for July 16, 2011, 3 AM EDT (8 AM GMT). The migration started 10 minutes earlier at 2.50 AM EDT (7.70 AM GMT) when we have begin shutting down the VPS system.

Some of you might know than when one takes a server that hosts VPs based on Virtuozzo OS virtualization down and start it after that, it usually does a disc quota check. Depending of the volume of data and on the size of the virtual servers, the check might take up to 4 hours. During that time all services that usually work on any single Virtuozzo container are down. So before shutting down the VPS machine we made a small change in configuration settings and set "DISK_QUOTA=no" and "VZFASTBOOT=yes". This allowed us to skip the disc quota check and to reduce the time period in which we the service would be down.

The VPS server has been taken off the rack at the old site at 3.10 AM EDT, July 16 and has been installed into a cabinet in the new Host Color's data center around 3.40 AM EDT. Shortly after the machine was connected to the network, we found out that some additional routing and IP configurations have be made on our routers. It took us us 40 minutes to make everything to work fine and to properly install and configure the server into the new network of Host Color.

The machine was back online around 3.50 AM EDT. The Virtual Private Servers have begun rebooting and started doing a disc quota check, one by one. The migration process was successfully completed around 4.40 AM EDT and all VPS accounts were back online around 4.50 AM. We needed to make some changes in the IP configurations of four (4) of the Virtual Private Servers, something that took us another 30 minutes.

We have initially expected that the migration to take us 60 to 70 minutes, but as sometimes happens it has taken almost 2 hours.

We have been sending messages on Twitter and in our Facebook account at the time when the server was shut down. We've also sent notification when the all the services on the VPS accounts went up. E-mails were also sent to all VPS customers hosted on the server.

All accounts owners who have Virtual Private Servers hosted on the server that has been migrated to the new data center now enjoy the new Host Color's fully-redundant network and a hight-quality bandwidth from Level 3 and Internap.