Migrating Solaris Servers from One Data Center to Other DC



1. Power down all the zones and apps that are writing to the specific ZFS file systems.
2. Mark a ZFS snapshot of these ZFS file systems.
3. Power on the Zones again so that services can be restored.
4. Copy the snapshots onto external hard drives
5. Ship the hard drives to the new Data Center.
6. Restore the snapshots into the destination servers.
7. Use rsync to transfer the zone configurations from the original server to the destination server.
8. Start the Zones and test the services at the destination server - this is for testing purposes.
9. Power down the zones and revert the ZFS file systems back to their snapshots (since the Zone based apps may have written to the ZFS file systems).
10. At the source data center, power down all the zones and apps that are writing to the specific ZFS file systems.
11. Mark a ZFS snapshot of these ZFS file systems.
12. Use zfs send to export a delta between the previous transported snapshot and the newly marked snapshot.
13. Use rsync to transfer the delta files to the destination Data center
14. Use zfs receive to restore the snapshots.
15. Start the Zones at the destination data center.