Is it possible to migrate Atlassian Products to a different server without re-install?

[Martin Sandaas]

I have an old Server running Atlassian Jira, Confluence and BitBucket.  It's a recent install after several upgrades had made the server slower and slower.

Now I'd like to move/migrate one or maybe two of the instances to a new server with much faster RAM, CPU etc.  I do not have lots and lots of RAM on either of the servers, so I'd like to experiment with how many applications will have to be migrated.

I'm using mod_proxy that routes links to any IP I'd like.  I also use an external MySql Server (all applications access this db through network, so "localhost" is not used for anything).  This means that application links are accessed through i.e confluence.mydomain.net, jira.mydomain.net...

I would really like to use the databases that have recently been migrated to a faster server, without having to export/import into a different database on the same server.

So that leads me to my question:

Is there ANY reason I cannot just copy both installation and home directories to the new server?  I mean the DNS lookup of names have not changed (only the underlying IP, which is not visible to any atlassian instance anyway).  The Database is identical, and ONLY referenced through DNS lookups (and the IP has NOT changed).  The OS is Debian Stretch (9) on both servers.  The only thing that has actually changed is the IP address of the server, and the hardware...

The only problem I can come up with is if there are internal workings of the atlassian products that I do not know about. Like if Jira adds references to bitbucket by resolving the DNS name, then storing the IP in the database.

But any such problem would still exist if one were to import the database.

So the last point I can see that could be a problem, is the Server ID.  Is it generated based on hardware setup?  Or is it random?  Will it cause problems when copying the instance to the new server?

Martin

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

A flat 1:1 copy with all the same path names across similar (let alone identical) operating systems will work fine.  It's effectively how a lot of us do disaster recovery or failover systems!

If your settings are all using host name references, you won't have any problems - Atlassian applications use what you tell them, and assume there's DNS around to resolve the host names if you use host names.  (There are some exceptions in integrations and white/blacklisting, but you'll spot these because their setup involves entering a host name and the application says "this resolves to x.x.x.x.x.x, is that ok?")

[Martin Sandaas]

Excellent!  Thank you.  That's exactly what I wanted to hear ;)