One of our servers is dangerously running out of space.

We are thinking about getting a new one with ample disk space to replace it.

What we want to do is make an exact mirror copy of old server on new server with more space on all partitions, then shut down old server, turn on new one, and hopefuly everything will work as before but with more space.

Is this possible to do? Is there a software or procedure to accomplish this?

Thanks for any insight on this issue.

Regards,

Rodrigo

Do you have raid setups? Or rack Servers?

If the new one is not ~100% identical components then simply mirroring the disk content will be a waste of time.

Why not ask your provider to upgrade the drives in your current machine - any half-decent server company will know how to dd

There's a tool built into Linux called DD. In this particular case, that would be your best bet. It would even clone Windows as well! I'd highly recommend that you use the command DD_Rescue. The rescue version of DD will detect and repair any broken blocks (that you may not even have known about!) so that you have a completely un-corrupted installation on a new drive.

The usage is as follows:

Example:
or

I'd also recommend to check out SysRescueCD. SysRescueCD's DD_Rescue application has a nice progress bar and ETA which is always nice. You can get that at http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page. You can burn it to a CD, copy it to a flash drive or even set it up on a PXE server.

Good luck!

R1Soft to mirror & Gparted to re-size the partitions

done it a couple times (painless)

Dedicated server mirroring consists to load balancing between two servers, where one server act as a master server and second one play the role of slave server. However, as you are just running out of the disk space so in my opinion simply purchase an extra hard drive, because in server mirroring each of your data replicate between two server so it won't solve your disk space problem...

RAID server or cloud hosting server option would solve your problems easily.

Having a Raid hard drive is a good thing, but Raid stands for improving disk performance and for service continuation in case of disk failure, that's it. Cloud hosting environment is idealistic for those who wants more redundancy and scalability. But here, OP is just running out of the disk space.

Cloud servers / VPS hosting would be perfect for the need to replicate a server exactly. We do this quite often out of our data center with Terminal Server machines, since we have everything virtualized with VMWare it's really easy to snapshot and clone a VM. We often spin up new VM's of the same image when we need extra capacity.

As the others have mentioned -- I would either A.) go with a cloud setup for your new infrastructure -- this would allow you to add SAN Servers for more storage at any given time - this would be painless, easy, and best of all NO DOWNTIME!! or B.) Utilize R1Soft backup - mirror it to the new server, then turn the new server online and port the IPs (via router) to the new server. This would provide you a seamless transition to the upgraded server..

I personally would go with the Cloud Setup - you can add servers in any area of the cloud as needed (unless you're going with the hourly billing setup, then you're stuck with the current setup -- unless OnApp has changed this?)

Good Luck

Could always use R1Soft so its not quite a mirror but its the same and continously protected. Or RAID