Broker migration

Learn more about the options you have when migrating brokers and copying data between brokers.

In case of catastrophic hardware failure brokers can be moved to a new host in a Kafka cluster. There multiple methods with which you can move brokers between clusters:

Using kafka-reassign-partitions tool: This method involves more manual work to modify JSON, but does not require manual edits to configuration files.
Modify the broker IDs in meta.properties: This method involves less manual work, but requires modifying an internal configuration file.
Using rsync: You can use rsync to copy over all data from an old broker to a new broker, preserving modification times and permissions.

Continue reading for instructions on how to move brokers by modifying broker IDs or using rsync. For instructions on how to migrate brokers with kafka-reassign-partitions, see the kafka-reassign-partitions tool description. For specific instructions on how to migrate existing Kafka partitions to JBOD configured disks, see JBOD disk migration.