IP migration involves moving servers between physical or virtual locations, which must be carefully planned to avoid downtime. Mission-critical data can be duplicated to ensure continuity, and the order in which servers are moved must be considered. DNS updates can take up to 48 hours.
IP migration is the migration of servers between locations. These locations can be physical changes in location or virtual address changes. IP migration needs to be handled properly as server addresses are not updated across the internet for up to 48 hours in some cases. Therefore, most IP migration changes are scheduled over a period of consecutive non-business hours.
Some organizations might implement the IP migration over a weekend when the business will be closed for an extended period. Others may need to set a specific downtime in which to handle a migration. If the business has mission-critical data that needs to be moved in an IP migration process, the business can first create a duplicate of that data. Once the data has been duplicated, the migration process can use the duplicated data for mission critical jobs and move the original data set. After the original dataset has been migrated, then the mission critical process is reset to use the original dataset location rather than the copy, which finalizes the migration for that dataset.
The planning process for IP migration should consider the order in which servers should be moved. For example, a process can access multiple servers for data. Each of the servers accessed in that process must be moved within the same basic time frame so that all are in their new locations when the process runs next time. The complexity of the planning process is roughly equivalent to the number of servers and processes affected by the move.
If the IP migration is small or isolated, an organization may choose to migrate during business hours. This decision could also be made when the servers being migrated do not support mission-critical applications. When only ancillary applications are migrated, an organization has much more planning flexibility. Often, an organization may schedule non-mission-critical IP migrations over a period of weeks during business hours so that technology personnel can work on these moves during normal business hours. This reduces the cost of that IP migration because overtime hours are limited.
The Domain Name System (DNS) used by the Internet as a directory for looking up servers has up to 48 hours to update the new server location; however, in many cases, the update happens very quickly. Sometimes a website’s server address can change in the morning and DNS recognizes it by early afternoon. In other cases, however, the variation may not be recognized for at least 48 hours. The length of time the change is detected depends heavily on the amount of activity that occurred immediately before and during a change.
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