Migrating (jails) to new hardware

[EHN Admin]

I'm looking for some advice. I have an old first gen freenas mini. For Christmas I'm getting a new mini XL+. I am contemplating my process of migrating from the old to the new.
I have 2 vlans, half dozen jails and 1 VM.
My new mini XL+ has only 4 drives currently so I could pull out my old 4 and place them in along side the new 4 in the mini XL+, if that would be helpful.

I could save the configuration off the old, move the old drives in and import the old config into the new machine. Then move all the data and jails from the old pool to the new pool. Would that work, any issues I should look out for.

I'm greatest concern is 'ease' of migration, if I end up with downtime of the freenas, jails or VM as a result. I'm fine with that. I can accommodate down time easily.

Thoughts, words of advice?
Thanks in advance

 

[Jailer]

Move all your drives over including your boot drive and start it up. You shouldn't have to import anything.

 

[EHN Admin]

Interesting thought, I would eventually want to move to the new SATA DOM though, for no other reason than it's large and can hold more snapshots.

 

[Jailer]

Interesting thought, I would eventually want to move to the new SATA DOM though, for no other reason than it's large and can hold more snapshots.

Then save your config, move your hard drives over, install FreeNAS on new server, upload saved config.

 

[msbxa]

Then save your config, move your hard drives over, install FreeNAS on new server, upload saved config.

I would prefer to completely move to new mini including your boot drive first and make sure Everything is running then replace your boot drive to SATA DOM. Don’t forget to save your config before doing anything.

 

[blanchet]

You can also use ZFS replication, so that you can compare the behavior of both FreeNAS mini.