How to copy a file from one unix server to another

The first thing to understand is that you're sharing the 1GB connection with other virtual machines. You're not the only person using the network. Ask how many other virtual servers are on that same host. If you're really nice, the sysadmins might let you look at the VMware Virtual Center Performance tab, which will show you the network use overall.

Next, windows drag & drop file copies aren't very efficient. One trick for speeding up file copies (if you really have to do this often) is to do it with the hosts via SCP/FTP instead. This isn't a quick setup, but here's how it works:

• Set up an FTP server on the VMware host (the same one the guest is running on)
• FTP (or SCP, if your sysadmins don't allow FTP) from the Windows guest to that VMware host (will run blazing fast since it doesn't actually go over the network - all file transfer is in the same host)
• From your physical boxes running Windows, connect to the VMware host's FTP/SCP server and grab the file.

Like I said, not easy, but once you do it it's blazing fast. It will still be constrained by the network that you're sharing with other virtual machines, though. For best practices, VMware recommends using multiple network connections, and you might be able to sweet-talk your sysadmins into using a separate network adapter for the FTP/SCP server.

It sounds like you might best be served with a relatively simple solution ... because you can tolerate a bit of downtime. I would avoid fooling with DNS, because you have little control over the propagation/caching delays.

1- build temp server
2- bring down services on primary server
3- move/copy key data from primary server to temp server
4- change primary server to another IP address
5- change temp server to primary IP address, bring up
6- fix primary server (on different IP)
7- bring down services on temp server
8- move/copy key data from temp server to primary server
9- turn off temp server
10- change primary server back to primary IP address, bring up

The only downtime is when the data is moved between servers, and will vary depending on how the data is moved.

Note: if you have a firewall and are doing NAT, changing the NAT between primary and temp is a good alternative to swapping IP addresses and will reduce the downtime.