I have been migrating a large number of websites and consolidating servers to reduce costs.
As a result it is important to ensure that services are migrated smoothly, planned effectively,
after which I had a think about aspects to consider prior to migrating services.

Planning

• Make a preliminary checklist of services actively in use by each active domain, I.e. FTP, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, MySQL etc.
• What maintenance periods do you have available, if at all?
  • What volume of traffic and when are your quietest periods?
• Do you have dedicated infrastructure, sharded, split by service/role?
  • Can parts of the infrastructure be migrated as an individual component
• List core functionality from the domain for testing purposes
  • Ideally this should be wrapped in unit tests as both functional
    • Examples are email, upload (permissions), adding/editing/removing users
• How many servers are you migrating?
  • Large quantities should be automated.
• How critical is the site/service
  • Does it stop 80 staff working?

Specific

• Services
  • Ensure services are initially installed on new server(s).
  • List all configuration files for a particular service (tree).
    • Ensure configuration between each service are identical or compromises are made.
  • List data directories for each service I.e. /var/lib/mysql
    • Can data be transferred automically.
    • Can services be replicated and brought into sync
    • Can data be back filled?
      • I.e Are large log tables required to make the site functional, what is the minimal effort required to bring the site functional?
• SSL
  • Ensure valid certificate exists for any CDN, sub-domain, domain.
• Email
  • Are there any special firewall, configuration requirements?
• DNS
  • Lower the TTL for a domain your preparing to transfer (if possible)
    • Cannot rely on low TTLs, these are cached amongst large corporates, ISPs etc.
  • Ensure the domain is bound to a unique VIP on new servers, if DNS resolution fails, you can put a header(‘Location 10.10.10.10′); in the old site to ensure the domain will resolve correctly.
    • Test this prior to transfer for both HTTP & HTTPS if applicable
• Permissions
  • Do you upload content to the servers, does your code write to the filesystem?
    • Is this writtable?
  • Under which user/group is this written?
• Cache
  • Does your site make use of distributed or local cache?
    • Could there be collisions between different sites, I.e. Do you prefix cache key names based on site?
• Networking
  • Can specific services be migrated prematurely?
    • Repoint via iptables, and keep an eye on bytes passing through the interface till redundant
• Security
  • Were there any firewall restrictions that need to be replicated, either hardware, iptables etc.
  • Chrooted, users copied, ssh keys copied.
• Optimizations
  • Were there any special optimizations, I.e. DnsMasq?, sysctl changes?
• Load balancing
  • Ensure each domain has its own VIP – HTTP_HOST fails in HTTP 1.0 clients
  • Ensure wild cards are not specified within virtual hosts – see above
  • Ensure sites with load balancing and over SSL use TCP requests correctly, in addition see first point.
  • ifdown each VIP in the webserver pool, does it failover with the correct site on all nodes?
• Monitoring
  • If previously had monitoring on servers (should do), has this been replicated to new servers?
• Database (Will vary depending on setup)
  • Is the database replicated?
    • Take LVM snapshots of the raw data on slave and rsync to new servers.
      • Ensure to change configuration such as server id’s, permissions on master, firewall, start service and start replication. Will be ready to start replicating with correct binlog positions etc.
• Other general changes
  • Are there customizations to /etc/hosts get sites working?

Let me know if there is anything you think I have missed.