Editing VPS Management (section)

=== pre-seeding a migration ===

When migrating a customer (or when doing many) depending on how much data you have to transfer, it can take some time. Further, it can be difficult to gauge when a migration will complete or how long it will take. To help speed up the process and get a better idea about how long it will take you can pre-transfer a customer's data to the destination server. If done correctly, vzmigrate will see the pre-transferred data and pick up where you left off, having much less to transfer (just changed/new files). 

We believe vzmigrate uses rsync to do it's transfer. Therefore not only can you use rsync to do a pre-seed, you can also run rsync to see what is causing a repeatedly-failing vzmigrate to fail. 

There's no magic to a pre-seed, you just need to make sure it's named correctly.

Given:

source: /vz1/private/1234

and you want to migrate to /vz2 on the target system, your rsync would look like:

 rsync -av /vz1/private/1234/ root@x.x.x.x:/vz2/private/1234.migrated/

After running that successful rsync, the ensuing migrateonline (or migrate) will take much less time to complete- depending on the # of files to be analyzed and the # of changed files. In any case, it'll be much much faster than had you just started the migration from scratch.

Further, as we discuss elsewhere in this topic, a failed migration can be moved from <tt>/vz/private/1234</tt> to <tt>/vz/private/1234.migrated</tt> on the destination if you want to restart a failed migration. This should '''only''' be done if the migration failed and the CT is not running on the destination HN.