Ubuntu: Simple way to move a production system to a new Hardware

Question

I am just preparing to move our production system to a new Hardware.

If possible I would prefer to have the same users/userid's on the new Machine. There's also a MySQL Database which is needed on the new Machine.

I am considering to put the harddisk from the new machine into the old production system and then use a diskimager to clone the original harddisk.

Do you that is a good idea? What kind of diskimager would you recommend? And - since the new harddisk is larger then the old one - how can I use the additional space on the new harddisk?

Any other helpful tips how can I do the move without having to much efforts are very appreciated.

Answer 1

You can do a dump of your system. I recommend to you to have a kernel not too old.

To simply copy it, boot on a live CD or something similar and run this command :

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy

hdx is your source device and hdy the destination. You also can do it throught an SSH connection :

ssh source_server_ip 'dd if=/dev/sda' | dd of=/dev/sda

Answer 2

Great news! I have been able to move the production system to the new machine without a lot of efforts using clonezilla.

And I did not even have to physically place the new machines hard drive into the production machine. It all worked in a seamless way by using the network.

Additionally clonezilla was able to resize the partitions proportionally on the new drive, see: http://tuxradar.com/content/how-clone-hard-drives-clonezilla

EDIT: clonezilla seems to use use dd as a fallback only. It uses a different approach on a "known" type of file system. This has the advantage of being a lot faster then dd because it doesn't have to include empty blocks.

Answer 3

I would just partition the new disk, then tar the old disk up and untar onto the new one. Re-run grub to make sure that it installs itself, and you're good to go. No worrying about disk imaging or having to resize partitions.