How to prepare Plesk server for migration

Question

What should be done to avoid errors during Plesk server migration?

Answer

1. All Plesk components that are used on the source server should be installed on the destination server as well. For example, if the source server has PostgreSQL or Mailman, these packages must be installed on the destination server. Otherwise, the corresponding data will not be transferred.

2. Make sure Plesk license on the destination server provides the same or broader feature set that the license of the source server does. Featured of different Plesk Editions are listed here. Contact Plesk Sales Team if license upgrade is required.

3. Check if free disk space on the source server is enough to dump the data. All databases are transferred as dumps, so there must be enough free disk space on the source server to store dumps of the 5 biggest databases within the temporary directory (by default it is /tmp/panel_migrator).

4. Configure IP addresses. Ideally, there should be a shared IP address on the destination server for every shared IP address on the source server. The same goes for dedicated IP addresses. During migration via GUI, Plesk performs IP address mapping automatically. 
5. The destination server must contain free disk space at least twice the size of the data being migrated. The extra space is needed to store the dump on the destination server and extract data from it.
6. Specify default MySQL character set latin1 in /etc/my.cnf:

   CONFIG_TEXT: [mysql]
   default-character-set=latin1

   To get current default characters:

   # MYSQL_PWD=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` mysql -u admin -e 'status' | grep characterset
   Server characterset: latin1
   Db characterset: latin1
   Client characterset: latin1
   Conn. characterset: latin1

7. Define the max_allowed_packet value for MySQL server in /etc/my.cnf to prevent issues during the database migration: 

   CONFIG_TEXT: [mysqld]
   max_allowed_packet = 64M
   …