Advice on moving cPanel 10/11 to new server

I am about to move a cPanel install from a dedicated server to a similarly sized virtual machine on a much beefier server, but I have a few concerns about making such a move during the transition period between v10 and v11.

The current system is based on the RELEASE tree and quotes it's version numbers as "WHM 10.8.0 cPanel 10.9.0-R10737". For the time being I've turned off automatic updates, until I decide how to proceed. My questions are:

1. If I install cPanel on the new machine, with a newly purchased license, in the next couple of days, will I get v10 or v11?

2. Am I better off waiting until v11 properly hits RELEASE, upgrading the old server, installing v11 on the new VM, then transferring accounts over, OR forcing an early upgrade to v11 on the old server, OR is it safe enough to leave the old arrangement as-is, and just transfer the accounts (ie. will accounts transfer cleanly from v10 to v11?)

2b. In fact, would I be better to rush a new v10 install, transfer the accounts over, and upgrade to v11 later?

I have to do the move in the next week or two. I'm trying to minimise the potential confusion caused by several changes happening at the same time (moving to a VM, moving to new IP ranges with the DNS modifications that this entails, and updating cPanel), which might make diagnosing problems more painful... If it makes mich difference, I plan to run the same base OS (CentOS 4.5) on the new setup as the old.

 

The reason for moving to a VPS is that there are other things that I want to run that may/will want different loob/library versions to those cPanel it supported with. Separating the tasks into VMs neatly sidesteps that issue. I am well aware of the I/O performance hit that is seen on many x86 virtualisation solutions, those these can be mitigated for the most part by the facts that: careful configuration can improve VM I/O performance significantly when you own and control the host the VM is running on and said host machine is not crowded, I'll be giving the VM a little more RAM then the current machine has, the new machine has much faster drives to start with, and my cPanel setup is small anyway.

Having weighed up the costs and benefits of keeping the cPanel seup on it's own box and getting a new machine for everything else, I decided it wasn't worth the cost of the extra physical machine. The new box really is a nice it of kit - I'm sure it will cope

 

Ah - choices are good! My current install was initially done by the server provider a couple of years ago now, this one will be done by little me.


On further question (which might be better placed in it's own thread...): If I experiment with an installation, mess things up and decide to start again from scratch - how will this affect licensing? i.e. would I need to jump through any hoops to get the replacement setup to accept my license, because cPanel's records know about the previous experimental one?

I'm thinking that "try the options first on a small scale, then decide" would be a safer option.