The Fedora Project has instances in a number of datacenters and clouds all over the world, but a majority of instances are in a datacenter located in Virginia, USA. This datacenter space, along with the majority of servers in it, were generously provided by our primary sponsor, Red Hat. We moved to our current space from another Red Hat datacenter back in 2020, and now it’s time to move again.

So why would we want to move? Well, there’s a number of reasons:

• We have expanded to fill all the physical rack space available. This leaves no room to expand  capabilities, like RISC-V builders, etc..
• We are hitting power limits. Several of our racks are close to the point where if one of the two power circuits went down, some machines would power off abruptly.
• Many of our machines were purchased during the previous data center move in 2020, and this new move will provides another opportunity to invest in more power efficient, faster, and denser hardware. 

After a bunch of discussion and planning, we will be moving to a new datacenter near Raleigh, NC. This site will give us room to expand and has much more available power, allowing for higher densities.

The good news – most of the new hardware has already been purchased! We plan to install and set up the new hardware in the new datacenter, logically switch to the new site with slightly temporarily diminished capacity ( mostly in staging ).Then, we will ship the newer machines from the old datacenter to the new one, bringing everything back to greater than 100% capacity.

Our goal is to complete this move over the course of a few weeks, and have everything back up with  greater capacity than before, and with as minimal impact to the project as possible.

We are looking at mid May to do the switchover, after Fedora 42 has been released.  Timing is still tentative, but we will provide more detailed information as the plan dates solidify. Our next key milestone is to use the Beta Go/No-Go as an indicator that this is the best time to execute the move. At the end of this transition we expect everybody’s experience will be faster builds, faster tests, and to have room for further expansion in the future.