Pretty much every time I do a migration from one data center or office migration I set up an OpenVPN that bridges the network segments at the two locations. It

Pretty much every time I do a migration from one data center or office migration I set up an OpenVPN that bridges the network segments at the two locations. It makes the move so much easier. Once set up, I can shut down a machine at one location, move it, bring it back up, and it's back in business. There are situations where we might want to migrate to new machines during the move, which this makes no harder. But for many things it makes them easier. For example, the last move went something like this: Set up the VPN+bridge. Move half the application servers. Set up new firewall/load balancer since we were replacing the old ones. Test the new fw/lb. Physically move the primary database server during a maintenance window and switch over to the new fw/lb. If there were problems, just switch back to the old one via DNS record changes (TTL was lowered weeks earlier). Move the remaining app servers. During the bridging setup, the LBs preferred the local app servers.