Migrate a Cloud Server to a New Physical Host

This article describes how to migrate a Rackspace Cloud Server to a new physical host device.

Cloud Infrastructure

Your Rackspace Cloud Server is a virtualized server, which lives on a physical hypervisor. The hypervisors in the hypervisor environment managed by Rackspace sometimes experience issues that impact your server performance. Therefore, Rackspace regularly migrates servers between hypervisor environments to ensure that your server performs to the best of its ability.

Reasons to Migrate

If you believe that your server performance is degraded, server migration is a quick way to rule out any underlying
infrastructure issues. Common reasons to migrate include:

• Unexplained degradation of performance
• Network connectivity
• High CPU/RAM usage
• High disk usage

Important: While these conditions can indicate a host-level issue, the same issues could exist on the server level and not be related to the host environment. Don't assume migration is a complete fix.

How to Migrate Your Servers

The following steps describe how to migrate a Rackspace Cloud Server to a new hypervisor in your customer portal.

Note: This process does not assign your server a new IP address.

1. From the customer portal, select Servers -> Cloud Servers.

2. Select the server you want to migrate to open the Server Details page.

3. On the Server Details page, select Actions and click Migrate Server.

This action initiates the reboot migration process. The portal displays the status as Resizing, but the server size does not change with this process. Your server remains active for most of the process but requires a reboot near the end of the migration. This process can take a while depending on the amount of data on your server. Make sure you account for some downtime or perform this task outside of your normal business hours.

Next Steps

After the migration has completed, log in to your server to verify the server is up and start any processes not set to start on boot. See Ensure servers reboot successfully for some things to check.

When your migration has finished, your server will be in the Verify Resize state. At this point, you will want to try and access your server to confirm whether the migration made any impact on the problems you were experiencing. Once you have verified the performance, applications, and services on your server are running as expected, click the Confirm Resize button on the Server Details page.

NOTE: The option to confirm will remain available for 24 hours. After this the migration will be confirmed automatically and cannot be reverted.

In some rare instances, the new host environment could exhibit similar issues. You can migrate again as needed, but if multiple host environments produce the same results, the issue is likely occurring at the server-OS level.