Aug 08, 2020 23:00:00

An unexpected method of moving a physical server running became a topic on the net

The

downtime that a web service cannot be used due to a failure or the like is desirable for both the side providing the service and the side providing the service. However, tasks such as physically moving a server can be difficult without powering down and causing downtime. An article that achieved such physical movement of the server with 'zero downtime' was posted on the overseas bulletin board Reddit and is attracting attention.

[Rant... sorta] Physically moved a server today... :sysadmin
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/i3xbjb/rant_sorta_physically_moved_a_server_today/

[FAQ][Rant... sorta] Physically moved a server today... :sysadmin
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/i4bi9i/faqrant_sorta_physically_moved_a_server_today/

Mattman, who posted an article on Reddit, said his customers asked him to 'move one server to another location.' Mattman told the customer, 'There is about 5 minutes of downtime,' but the customer said, 'There should be no downtime for a second.' Mattman, who once refused the request under harsh conditions, decided to talk to a friend and undertake a server move in exchange for a high pay.

The distance to move the server is about 200m. Mattman prepared for the move work with three Category 6 LAN cables and three switches, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) , and a luggage carrier to move the server. The three switches received power from the trucks that were parked in the parking lot, and each was connected to a LAN cable.

After making settings such as DNS to change the access destination address, set the two network cards (NIC) on the server as failover . The network was successfully separated by connecting the LAN cable connected to the original network and the LAN cable connected to the switch to the two NICs and disconnecting the original cable.

Following the network, Mattman decided to connect the power supply to the UPS. The power supply of the server is

redundant to 2 systems, so even if you disconnect one power cable, the server will not go down. After disconnecting one power cable and connecting to the UPS, connect the other power cable to the UPS. Now you can separate both power supplies into the UPS on the carrier.

By separating the power supply and the network, the server can be moved. Mattman spent more than two hours carefully moving the server to his new office, swapping LAN cables for another switch. After testing for a while after moving, it seems that he was able to confirm that there was no downtime.

In addition, since the server that Mr. Mattman moved was running the service on the virtual machine by Hyper-V, the comment 'Is it possible to perform live migration?' was seen. In response to this comment, Mattman said, 'Since 2003, we have been dealing with Hyper-V, but live migration of virtual machines on Hyper-V moving to another server with the virtual machine running with zero downtime. Has finally succeeded in 2019. I didn't have the assurance that I could move without downtime, so I left it off this time.'

In the end, Mattman and his friends spent 10 hours on a job that would only take 5 minutes if they were tolerant of downtime, so that's worth the $17,000 consulting cost. And he said he charged the work cost to the customer. It is in the comments section of Reddit, 'the operator of this service, to have found worth 180 million yen to be down time there is no, there is no redundancy in the server configuration itself' such opinion has been asked.