Hi!

I have an old machine which I need to upgrade (both hardware & software).
I haved to talked to EV1 people and what I could understand is that they will install a fresh hard drive and slave my current hard disk .. so that i can configure the server and restore my sites back.

I have near 100 sites hosted on this machine and I need some automated system to do the restore and backup, any comment, suggessions..

Asif Iqbal

Your main problem to deal with, in case you were trying to get around this one with the Slave Drive approach, is that you're either going to have to take the current server from 5.0 to whatever version of 7.x you're going to be using, or wipe out the Plesk on the secondary drive, install 5.0 there, transfer over all of the data, then do all of the incremental upgrades from there.

You can't go straight from 5.0 to 7.anything-that's-the-latest in a single step. So any automated type of solution is going to be fraught with difficulties.

You didn't ask for it, but I'll give you my personal opinion. It's much easier and safer for a production server to simply lease another Plesk 7.x server, make sure everything is updated, then use Migration Manager to move over all of the domains to the the new location.

Once that's done you can tweak the DNS in the old server so that everything points to the new server. And change the DNS for your nameservers if you're running your own or change all of the domain records so that they point to the new server.

That'll keep you from having any downtime and give you an easy backup plan in case it becomes necessary. Though it does require that you overlap the server leases. I generally try to keep the old server running for a month to let DNS propagation take place.

Thankyou Squire! running a machine in parallel seems a better work around.

Earlier I was thinking of creating a dump of current domains on currently running hard disk and when the machine comes online with this hard disk slaved. I would have run the restore utlities .. but it means more downtime.

thankyou for your comments

Asif

I would just install a new server with plesk7.5 and then use the migration agent to bring the domains in from the v6. Dunno if that would work for sure, but that's teh approach I would take.

Moved ..not a how-to