Hi,

I have a personal server with various services running: Apache, bind, SVN, redmine, MySQL, postgresql, accounts for family members, a homebrew SMTP server, etc.

However every 2 years or so I migrate the server to a new machine, to get the new upgrades for the service, or because of issues with the provider. I find myself reinstalling everything, which takes a lot of time.

I'll have to migrate soon again due to network issues at my current provider, but this time I'd like to do it so that the *next* time will be as painless as possible. I've looked at the various options, running everything in VMs, or in containers, or simply mirroring the whole disk. Also going forward some kind of isolation between services and accounts would be nice.

I can't make up my mind because I lack experience with any of these options. So do you have some advice on how I might approach this? Assuming I go the VM/container way, is there a way to avoid having to maintain the OS updates separately in each one?

I'm running Debian stable.

Thanks.

Good day,

For me,VM Environment will more flexible in terms of migration and roll back/recovery in any issue incase.

For this other concern "is there a way to avoid having to maintain the OS updates separately in each one?"
correct me if Im wrong ,but if what you want is to Centralize Management of Linux OS Updates,I think you can use this
tool "Space Walk"
http://spacewalk.redhat.com/

regards,
yohey03

You can write a shell script for it and you can run it when you want to migrate.

There are several tutorials available. You can google.
Here is an example.

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_c...command-line-0

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_c...d-line-stage-3