Migrating Splunk Enterprise from RHEL to Windows

[jkamdar]

Hi, 

Yes, you read it right. One of my small lab is planning to migrate their Splunk deployment from RHEL to Windows. Their main reason is, they do not have a Linux admin. 

I am going to help them migrate but I am Linux admin and never done any migration from one platform to another. Has anyone done that? Any tips on how to go about doing it?

[jkamdar]

Thanks, appreciate the help.

[gcusello]

Hi @jkamdar ,

let me know if I can help you more, or, please, accept one answer for the other people of Community.

Ciao and happy splunking

Giuseppe

P.S.: Karma Points are appreciated 😉

[gcusello · Accepted solution]

Hi @jkamdar ,

Windows could be ok for a lab, not for a production system!

First question: is a stand-alone server or a distributed environment?

If a stand-alone server it's simple and I can give you some tips:

• start from the same Splunk Version,
• copy the apps from the old to the new one,
• modify eventual monitor inputs using the new path

If instead it's a distributed environment, you can copy the indexes.conf files in one app containing all the indexes definitions, and all the apps in the search Heads.

For the cluster or distributed search configurations,it's easier start as a new infrastructure, configuring all the connections.

These are few pillows but the easiest way is to start from the beginning copying one by one the indexes files.

The main issue is to migrate data.

Ciao.

Giuseppe

[jkamdar]

Thanks @gcusello 

Yes, it's a stand alone server. 

My comments/questions in-line below

• start from the same Splunk Version - Yes, good point, will do that
• copy the apps from the old to the new one - Are you referring to apps like add-ons, Splunk_TA_nix and Splunk_TA_windows?
• modify eventual monitor inputs using the new path - Do you mean update inputs.conf?

[gcusello]

Hi @jkamdar ,

About the apps to migrate, I mean all the apps not contained in the Splunk installation, if you install the same version of Splunk, you could copy the full $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps folder.

beware to the last point: if in your apps there is some path, you have to manually modify paths to adapt them from linux to Windows, e.g. splunk internal logs must be moved from /opt/splunk/var/log/splunk to C:\Program Files\splunk\var\log\splunk.

Ciao.

Giuseppe