Question Best Practice updating OS for Plesk Obsidian on Centos 6.x

[futureweb]

Hey there,
we got several Plesk Obsidian Servers still running on Centos 6.x. As Centos 6 is EOL we want to upgrade them to Centos 8.x.
As far as I know there is no possibility to in-place upgrade Centos 6->8 ... right?

So what would be the best practice for such an upgrade?

As lot's of Hostings on those Servers got DNS-Hosting not by us but external it would be cruical that the IP won't change ... so migrate, assign old IP to new Server, done ... something like that? I know I can migrate everything using the Migration Manager... but is it that easy to switch the IP to the old one afterwards?
Are there any Problems to expect? A few years back we had issues with Mails after migrating ... all Customers had to re-download all IMAP Mails ... and all POP3 Mails were also downloaded again ... resulting in lot's of complaints ... :-/

Hope you got some insights/ideas for me on this ... ;-)

thx, bye from Austria
Andreas

 

[IgorG]

What about backup/restore procedure? Make a full Plesk backup on remote storage, then create a new server with the latest version of Plesk, OS and the same IP address and restore the backup to this system from your remote backup storage.

 

[futureweb]

Hey @IgorG,
the Plesk Servers are up to 600-700GB in Size ... guess such a backup/restore would take ages to complete ... within that Timeframe hundreds of our Customers won't get Mails and also their Websites are down ... not the ideal deal ... :-/
Is there really no "best practice" on how to get Plesk Servers on up2date OS? :-(
(a few Hours downtime are ok, we can fit that into maintenance window, but I fear this backup/restore would take much longer?!?)

 

[Martin Dias]

There are no Dist-Upgrades supported on CentOs.
Depending on your infrastructure if you can move the IP form 1 server to another then migration would be an option.
If you cannot move the IP from one server to the other than or the backup/restore procedure that Igor proposed or to migrate to a new Server and request your customers to change the DNS

 

[Kaspar]

I use the Plek Migration Tool to move customers/websites from one server to another server. This takes quite a bit of time, but I have found this to be the most reliable methode.

 

[futureweb]

@Arashi - Servers & IPs are under our control - so yes - moving them between servers is no problem. It's just the Time a Backup/Restore would take for 700GB ... guess Website/Mails of our Customers would be down half a day or longer until this Operation is done and we can move the IP to the new Server ... guess I will give it a test on how long such a restore really takes ... but fear it's longer than expected for such amounts of Data :-(

@Rasp - if we move hundreds of Customers 1by1byHand we won't make a single $ with their Hosting the coming years because the Employee doing the moves costs more than the Hosting itself ... so no option ;-)

 

[moswak]

@IgorG,
with a full plesk backup is the address book of the roundcube users included?
Are the customer's backup plans and existing backups included?

if not then migration via the migrator extension is actually better since you can transfer while the pages are online and only for the last sync and for the ip change the pages are offline. right?

i would like to have a way of not leaving the roundcube address books and the backup plans and backups of the customers on the line.

 

[futureweb]

Hey there,

since Plesk has now also discontinued the updates for Centos 6 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has entered the vendor end of support phase. Plesk Obsidian 18.0.32 is the last Plesk Obsidian version that supports that OS.) It is probably time that the topic was discussed to tackle ...

Are there perhaps people who have already moved 600-800GB Plesk instances using the Migration Manager and could share a few experiences? Have there been problems? Is there anything to watch out for?

My approach at the moment would be:
1) Migration Manager -> All websites to the new server
2) Assign the IP of the old server to the new server (what would be the correct way for a mass IP change for all pages hosted in Plesk?)

Otherwise anything to consider?

Thank you, best regards from Tyrol
Andreas S.

ps) When is support vor Virtuozzo Linux 8 planed for Obsidian? As this would be the way to go for us ... thx

 

[mow]

If servers, IPs and routers are under your control it might even be possible to install the new server with the same IP and do the rest with some dark routing magic.