I am about to migrate an existing up to date virtualmin install (pro license) from centos to almalinux 9 using the direction here https://www.virtualmin.com/docs/data-operations/how-to-migrate-to-a-new-server/.
What is the situation regarding the hostname of the new server once a restore of the full backup is complete, will this need changing back to the same as the original server along with the original IP address or will this be handled during the restore procedure?
Thanks.
No. The system hostname doesn’t matter for anything. What gives you the idea that it would need to match the old server?
IP address will generally be changed automatically, assuming both the old and new systems were configured correctly.
There will be no need to manually change the IP addresses (or anything else) after the restore process is completed. If the IP addresses (IPv4 and ipv6) of the new server are different from the IP addresses of the old server, Virtualmin’s backup / restore process manages the application of the correct IP address automatically. It will work exactly as easily as is implied in the documentation that you have seen, provided the OS, web server and databases server is the same or similar on both boxes.
Joe is correct about the hostname - it does not matter. However, if you have your clients using your hostname (i.e. hostname of the old Virtualmin server) as the incoming and outgoing server in their email clients (like I did for all my Virtualmin servers till recently) then you need to think that through. And if not, if your clients use their own domains as incoming and outgoing server in their email clients, thanks to SNI support in Virtualmin, then you can disregard the hostnames issue altogether - you can set the hostname of the new Virtualmin server to any subdomain that you fancy.
Virtualmin’s restore is quite granular in the control that it offers about what exactly is restored from the backup, when an individual domain / virtual server is restored. See:
This might give you an insight into all the things that are being managed in the migration process via which domains / virtual servers are transferred in bulk.
Thanks for the response. I wasn’t sure whether the internal hostname would be referenced in any way within the various config files from the old server. I do use the fqdn on all clients so that shouldn’t be an issue either.
It would be and it is. Virtualmin takes care of whatever is required to be changed when you do a server migration or a restore from Virtualmin’s backup.
I think you are good to go.
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