What’s going on?
It is Friday..
..and it is time to give you a short update on something that we have been working on for a while.
Kolab Now is running on high-end equipment located in a data-center in Bern, Switzerland. It is running the Email- and Groupware services for our customers, such as you. Where as we are aware that Email is ‘mission critical’ for our users, we do what we can to keep the service stable and alive 24/7.
The criticality of the service, and our drive to keep it running, means that all our equipment of course is under warranty. Should a server break, we will have an IBM service engineer onsite within the hour, assisting us with the broken hardware in the data-center. This is a large part of what you pay for.
This warranty is about to expire on some of our equipment, and we have spent some time and effort lately on building up a new environment with new fresh high-end servers under new warranty. We have tested the new environment extensively, and we believe that we are ready to move forward with a planned migration from the existing old environment to the new environment.
What are we doing
As noted, we are moving Kolab Now to new hardware. This is easily said, but the preparation and testing has already involved a lot of work, and we still have some final configurations and operations to perform and test.
– While moving to a new environment, we also move Kolab Now another step forward towards new technology. Kolab Now was always running the latest and greatest version of Kolab. During the latest time though, the intensity of development on Kolab has been high, and we have hold back a bit on pushing all new technology forward to Kolab Now. As mentioned, we do what we can to keep the Kolab Now service as stable as possible for you.
Lately we have made some great new leaps on Kolab development. Some of these new technology advances has now proven their validity in the wild, and those are ready to be brought into production.
What will happen on the migration day
We have planned the migration to happen on Monday the 9th of March. We will keep updating the blog with more information as we move along towards the day. So if you follow and read this blog, you will be prepared when things are happening. At this time the plan for the migration day looks like this:
- The service will be interrupted
- Data will be moved to the new environment,
- DNS will be switched over to point at the new environment. The new IP addresses will already be in place (we have used them for testing).
- As DNS is switched over to the new environment, access to the new environment can be opened, and you will again have access to your data.
- As the MX record is defined in DNS, this will also be switched over, so that Emails are now forwarded to the new environment.
- During the migration period, Emails will be queued at sending servers. As soon as the MX has been switched over, the sending servers will resend the queued Emails. No Email should be lost during the migration.
- If you have the old IP addresses hard coded anywhere, e.g. into an SPF statement or into a desktop client configuration, then you should change such entries to the correct DNS records. We of course will make sure to update the knowledge base where it makes sense. E.g. we have this article about DNS settings for private domains, this article about setting up IMAP clients, or this article about the systems that we are running. Those will all be reviewed and updated if needed.
When the migration has happened and DNS is switched over to point at the new environment, we will update this blog with a new post, and you are able to login and check your data. You will not see big changes to the interface. Everything will look the same. However behind the UI, some things will have changed. Over the coming weeks we will make more posts here on this blog.
Should you have questions or concerns for this information, then please contact Support .