Wanting instructions on migration and upgrade of a production system

[rayb2001]

We would like to get some advice on how to migrate our production server to new H/W and at the same time upgrade from 5.18 to 6.02.

We have very small windows that we can take the production server out of service.

We found the blog that tells how to migrate to new H/W by using rsync and we also know how to upgrade to 6.

What we would like to do is to test this process ahead of time to ensure we have it and get an idea of the timing.

Obviously, once we finish the rsync, the ‘new’ server is almost identical to the production server and so we can’t just bring it online to test it and see if it’s working. We can not rename the ‘new’ server because it will send LDAP reqs to the production server and not our test server.

So, we are very nervous about how to proceed and could use some advice. If there are online resources for this sort of thing, we haven’t found them.

If anyone has a sandbox and you have tested this would you be willing to share the configuration? Obviously, we'll need access to the production server to run the rsync but we need to be able to turn off the external net (we think that's what we need but maybe you've found an alternate way to run the test system without impacting the production system given that they both have the same IP/URL after the rsync)

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I think useful to others here.

[ArcaneMagus]

You should probably setup a Split DNS on the test server so when it queries for the address it just gets the answer you want it to, not the production server's address.