Can we "just" move the database LUNs (this is on a SAN, and the servers are ESX VMs) from the old server to the new server, and then rebuild all indices with text columns?
Pretty much yes. Though we do it slightly different: - setup physical replica on the new host - use amcheck for all btree indexes and add those that needs reindexing to the list - add all non-btree indexes where we can find attributes with pg_collation.collname NOT IN ('C', 'POSIX') to the same list - run reindexing in parallel via xargs to measure time required (replica should be re-created after this of course).