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As part of Linode's migration of servers to a new Data Center in Dallas, two of our servers were scheduled for migration at 10pm EDT on September 29, 2017. NCommander happened to be around when I sent out a reminder I'd received from Linode, so he 'hit the button' at 9:30pm tonight (Sept. 28) and did a manual migration ahead of time.
Unless you were on our IRC server (Internet Relay Chat) at the time, you probably didn't even notice... and even then, it was unavailable for only about 15-20 minutes. Redundancy for the win!
That leaves us with a single server, sodium, to migrate. It is currently scheduled for migration on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 at 10:00pm EDT. Since sodium is one of two front-end proxies for us (the other is magnesium which has already been migrated), I expect we'll be able to perform that migration without any site interruption.
Separately, and in parallel, we are slowly moving our servers from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Gentoo.
To the community, thank you for your patience as we work our way through this process. And, for those of you who may have been with us from the outset, and when up-time was measured in hours, please join me in congratulating the team for their dedication and hard work which has facilitated such an uneventful migration!
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday October 02 2017, @07:51AM
While this is possible in theory, Linode doesn't support this, and in my experience, live migration on Amazon was a crapshoot at best, and didn't work across availability zones (which is the closest equivalent here). Each migration required a full powerdown, image transfer (~5-10 minutes), and then recovery. This usually worked without issue though neon's migration had serious network loss issues when we first did it.
Under normal circumstances, IPv4 failover also works exactly the way you describe, but IPv6 failover is stupidly black magic, and isn't supported by Linode, combined with the fact about 10-15% of all SN traffic is IPv6, the loadbalancers are a special case when we need to play the hardware migration song and dance.
Furthermore, full redundancy for things like off-lining a server for maintenance is still important and a lot of large websites seem to run on a single DB server with a web frontend and thus have bad things happen if/when anything major has to happen.
Still always moving