Hi all,
and here an update from the ops side, for those who are interested in the technical/server side details and what has been happening in the background.
* Loadbalancing: once we actually switch to production, you will be served by your own Loadbalancer called wikivoyage-lb.wikimedia.org
wikivoyage-lb.wikimedia.org is an alias for wikivoyage-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org. wikivoyage-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org has address 208.80.154.243 wikivoyage-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org has IPv6 address 2620:0:861:ed1a::13
the "eqiad" part tells you that currently you are being served from the "Equinix (EQ) data center near Washington Dulles (IAD)". It will be possible to serve users from a different data center based on their geo location if needed, or fail-over, and yes, it will support IPv6 too.
* SSL: as soon as we successfully transferred the domain we can order a wildcard *.wikivoyage.org SSL cert then you will have https one all wikis and without warnings for self-signed certs, and this will be handled by SSL proxies, the Apache backends just need to talk HTTP
* DNS: the 3 Wikimedia DNS servers are ns0, ns1 and ns2.wikimedia.org. They are configured to have zones for wikivoyage-old.org , wikivoyage.org and wikivoyage.de. The latter 2 are currently just links to wikivoyage-old.org and that we setup to point back to your servers (america and asia) just like before. Once we get the .org and/or .de domain we will change those to point to our loadbalancers but of course leave the -old domain as it is. So your old servers will always be accessible under the wikivoyage-old.org domain.
*MySQL: we will host you on cluster "s3" and there will be 1 master and 8 slaves, 4 per data center (one in US, one in Europe), who replicate. Our whole database tree can be seen here for the curious: http://noc.wikimedia.org/dbtree/
As Erik pointed out please bear with us if not everything is perfect within the first day, but i really hope you can (soon) appreciate the new features of a current Mediawiki, secure connections, uniform URLs for all wikis, loadbalancing, IPv6 etc.
Let me point out that (almost) all of our server configs involved are also publicly viewable, clonable and everyone who is interested is welcome to submit patches to our code review. (git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/operations/puppet | https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Git)
The stuff above is in the operations-puppet repo, Loadbalancer: lvs.pp SSL: protoproxy.pp MySQL: mysql.pp .. ). These are "Puppet" manifests.
Also anyone interested will be able to use Wikimedia Labs to test things yourself on virtual machines. (http://labs.wikimedia.org).
Finally let me add that personally i am a travel enthusiastic myself, just moved from Germany to S.F. and used your wikis (yeah, as a reader) long before i heard anything about a move to the WMF or worked here. So for me there won't be a strict separation between "the wmf" and "the community" and it is great to be involved in a new project start at the wmf, especially if it is a wiki about travel, yay! That also doesn't happen every day here;)
Hope we can have fun with the new stuff and get the images done together quickly. We will be pretty busy the next days, but also feel free to drop in on IRC (Freenode , #wikimedia-tech) if you want to report issues in realtime.
See you on the wikis,