cPanel to cPanel New Hardware Migration

I have also submitted this as ticket #2517478.

My existing server is cPanel/WHM 11.30.6 on RHEL 5.2 (32-bit).

Current data is approximately 90GB over 28 accounts. Some of those accounts have unique IPs, but the vast majority share the main IP.

I have purchased new server hardware which is cPanel/WHM on RHEL 5.x 64-bit.

I'm reasonably comfortable doing the EasyApache/PHP/MySQL etc. build scripts and should be able to set up a similar configuration on the new server to what I have on the old one. But I want to be absolutely certain that I can migrate all of the accounts, data, e-mails, etc. from the old server to the other with a minimum of downtime.

Question #1: I have not completed cPanel/WHM setup on the new server because I am not sure what hostname or nameservers to put. I wish to avoid any conflict/collision with my active server.

Question #2: After I have completed migration, can I change hostnames, DNS names, on the new server etc. to what they should be?

Question #3: The new server has a single shared IPv4 IP address. Should I migrate my dedicated IP accounts to the shared IP address BEFORE the migration? Or will the migration script handle this ok?

Question #4: The old server is RHEL 5.2 32-bit. The new server is RHEL 5.2 64-bit. Are there any considerations or things I need to watch out for in this case?

Question #5: Is "Copy Multiple Accounts/Packages from Another Server" sufficient to backup and restore public_html, permissions, IMAP/exim e-mail, FTP accounts, mailing lists, parked domains, subdomains, etc.?

Question #6: Is there an exhaustively detailed thread on the cPanel/WHM forums that fully documents this process? (and if not, why not? )

 

Thank you kindly for your response.

I am now starting this process and at step 2 I am already at a dead end.

My current server is feldon.feldoncentral.com.
The new server is feldoncentrali7.feldoncentral.com.

I have gone through the WHM/cPanel setup on the new server, but I have no assurance it is set up correctly. When asked, I gave it my current DNS servers (ns1.feldoncentral.com and ns2.feldoncentral.com). Note that feldoncentrali7.feldoncentral.com does not currently resolve. I must access WHM via the IP address to reach it.

I ran through the DNS Clustering setup.

First, I tried setting the old server to "write only" and the new server to "standalone", but the DNS Path Diagram would not show both servers on both WHM screens, so I set it (reluctantly) to "Synchronize changes" on both servers, and now both the old and new server show under DNS Path Diagram, but they are "flip-flopped" on each.

The old server shows:

Code:

DNS Path Diagram
     feldon.feldoncentral.com
            ↳ feldoncentrali7.feldoncentral.com

The new server shows:

Code:

DNS Path Diagram
     feldoncentrali7.feldoncentral.com
            ↳ feldon.feldoncentral.com

Is this a problem or is this correct for what I am wanting? Am I ready to start moving accounts and settings over?

What steps do I need to do when I am finished moving all accounts to make the new server properly serve ns1.feldoncentral.com and ns2.feldoncentral.com?

 

Well someone's reading this thread. Someone at 199.119.206.111 trying to brute force my cPanel/WHM.