mirroring a server and/or hot standby

Hello All,

I am looking for documentation pointers on how to move the contents of an
existing/working single-instance server to a new instance. As in: I have a
Postgres server running in a VM and I want to move it to a different OS in
a different VM guest.

Is there a way to gracefully do this? Is there a way to "sync" to a new
server? Do I need to do this the hard way by manually copying all the data
over to a new server with SQL?

It seems that setting up a hot standby server may be the way to go but
chapter 25 in the user doc is scant on setup/install detail for this
configuration. I am also interested in setting up an offsite hot standby
server for failover.

Suggestions for tools and/or further reading welcome!

Thanks in advance,

John