FR-SD2 Closure and Migration Plan

Recently, we announced that we would be closing one of datacenters, FR-SD2 and we outlined our basic migration plan. We’re now able to add more specifics to this plan, including elements catering to the needs expressed by our customers over the last couple of weeks since we initially made the announcement. Specifically, we moved the closure date for FR-SD2 to December 29, 2017 and we enabled most impacted customers the ability to keep their public IP addresses.

It’s important to note that migrating from one datacenter to the other won’t impact the billing of your hosting or your bandwidth consumption. As a reminder, all Cloud (IaaS) services and Simple Hosting (PaaS) must be migrated to our new datacenter FR-SD3 (already open), FR-SD5, or FR-SD6 (not open yet but currently in the works) before December 29, 2017.

Please read the following migration plan closely and of course feel completely free to ask us anything you’re unsure about.

Migration plan for servers and other Cloud resources (IaaS)

Your migration plan for Cloud (IaaS) will take place in four phases:

1. Manual migration starting May 22, 2017
2. Migration of detached disks starting September 11, 2017
3. Two-click server migration starting October 2, 2017
4. Mandatory migration of remaining services by our team on November 29, 2017

Phase 1: Manual migration, starting May 22, 2017

The first phase in our migration plan started in May following our first communication regarding the closure of our datacenter FR-SD2. At that point, we invited our customers to migration their resources manually.

Phase 2: Migration of detached disks starting September 11, 2017

Following the introduction of this function on our website and API, our customers will be able to launch the migration of their disks initially to the new datacenter FR-SD3, but later also to FR-SD5 and FR-SD6, once these become available. Snapshots, whenever they exist, will be migrated along with the disk.

This feature is likely to be very useful to customers who needing to have full control over scheduling down time, such as those who usually create new servers from a custom disk image.

Once the migration of a disk has been completed, it will then be possible to attach it to either an existing or newly created server, on whichever datacenter to which you wish to migrate.

Here’s how this kind of migration procedure could look:

• Create the server in the datacenter (FR-SD3, FR-SD5, or FR-SD6) of your choice
• Associate to it the IP addresses in advance
• Migrate your disk(s)
• Attach your disk(s) to your new server, taking care to manage any necessary DNS changes ahead of time

Don’t forget that migrating a system disk linked to the HVM platform will require some modifications related to adapting to the Xen platform used on FR-SD3. We recommend that you consult the online documentation in order to ensure you are correctly preparing your disk(s).*

Finally, please note that copying a disk usually takes around one minute per Gb of storage, though depending on the number of simultaneous copies, it could take much longer or much shorter than that.

Phase 3: Two-click server migration starting October 2, 2017

Following the introduction of this function on our website and API, it will be possible to move a server along with all associated resources, to one of the new datacenters in two steps (two clicks).

The first click will copy all disks attached to the server to the destination datacenter, without any change or impact on the source server (which will remain functional and available on the FR-SD2 datacenter). Once all disks are copied, we will send you an automatic email to prompt you to complete the rest of the server migration (the second click).

Be aware that this second stop will involve the following:

• Stopping your server
• Verifying the synchronization of all data between disks (and completing this when not yet complete)
• Creating resources on the selected destination datacenter

When your resources are ready, a new server will be spun up on the new datacenter with the same characteristics and the same IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Disk repulsion settings will be also be preserved (“Repulsion” is a system that assures that two disks are physically located on separate storage units).

The total downtime can vary depending on the amount of data to be synchronized. The greater the volume of data that will have been changed between the end of the first step and the beginning of the second, the longer the synchorization will take (estimated at one minute per Gb copied), and so we recommend launching the second step as soon as you have received notification that the first step has completed. Your migrated server will thus be available more quickly.

In order to proceed with your migration, we would remind those of you with servers on our HVM platform that you must first migrate or prepare for migration to the Xen platform used on FR-SD3 (and future datacenters), since the HVM platform will not be available on the new datacenters. As with the above phase, we would suggest consulting the documentation in order to correctly prepare your servers.*

Important notes:

1. Please understand that this method does not allow you to choose between datacenters. Our system will automatically determine which datacenter to migrate to based on the public IP address currently assigned to the server. This means that you cannot launch the migration of certain servers before FR-SD5 and FR-SD6 open. We will notify you by email when migration is available for your server(s).
2. This automatic migration may not be available for all servers. Specifically , servers connected to Web Accelerators or VLANs. Impacted customers will be contacted directly by our team.
3. Some servers have many public IP addresses and it may be required to change one or more of secondary IP addresses in the months following this migration. In this case, our team will contact all impacted customers as well.

Phase 4: Mandatory migration of remaining services by our team on November 29, 2017

From the above date on, and following a series of reminders, our teams will migrate any remaining services on FR-SD2. Any servers still present on FR-SD2 will be migrated by group, following an arbitrary schedule that you will not be able to select to minimize downtime.

Furthermore, all servers using the HVM platform will be migrated to the Xen platform at this time. Those customers who have not yet prepared for this migration risk losing emergency console access if they have not yet executed the commands indicated in our documentation.

All servers will therefore be migrated to FR-SD3, FR-SD5, or FR-SD6, depending on their principal IP addresses. During this phase, you will still have the possibility to migrate your resources yourselves prior to your server being migrated by our teams using the migration tools that will be available to you (see previous phases above).

We strongly recommend that you do not wait until this phase to migrate your servers yourself. During a migration initiated by our teams, you will temporarily lose access to the impacted servers. However, any resulting downtime will not exceed 30 minutes.

*Be aware that should you not make the necessary modifications to settings upstream, the “kernel” and “cmdline” options on your disk will be automatically updated to function on Xen. This may cause issues on your server, potentially resulting in downtime for your services.

Simple Hosting migration plan (PaaS)

Migration of Simple Hosting (PaaS) resources will be totally automatic. Instances will be moved, by our teams, without any interventions on the part of our customers, onto one of the three new datacenters (FR-SD3, FR-SD5, or FR-SD6), sometime during the months to come.

Very important note: After migration, the username and URLs for accessing instance management (control panel, sFTP, and git) will change. Only the password will remain the same. A notification email will be sent to you following the completion of each migration. This email will provide you with your new username and the URLs needed to access the administration of your instance. In addition, this information will also be available via your Simple Hosting management interface, whether that’s on #gandiv5, our classic interface, or via Gandi CLI.

In most cases, DNS records will not need to change, and your associated web services should function as normal.

A small minority of customers will, however, need to attend to a few particular details regarding this migration. In particular, we are aware of a number of “exotic” DNS configurations, for example:

• CNAME records pointing to our test URL vhosts (url-de-test.ws)
• Records pointing to different Web Accelerators for sites on the same instance

These configurations should be corrected before migration of your Simple Hosting instance(s). Our teams will contact you directly if you are one of these customers and will provide you with specific instructions about how to correct these issues.

Finally, please note that external IP addresses, used for all outbound requests from a Simple Hosting instance to third-party services, will also change once migration is complete. The use of such IP addresses are normally not supported by our Simple Hosting service and can be subject to change. Nonetheless, if such IP addresses are a part of your configuration (for example, ACL on external services), you should update it once your instance has been migrated. In any case, we would strongly discourage you from continuing this practice as it is not supported and subject to instabilities.

Once migrated, Simple Hosting instances on our new infrastructure, completed several months ago at this point, and should see an overall performance improvement.

Still need help?

If you have any questions about this migration, we would encourage you to contact our Hosting Support team, who would be more than happy to walk you through migrating your hosting services.

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