Question CentOS -> RHEL without breaking Plesk?

[Ross Edwards]

Hi - forgive me if this has already been posted, but I can't find it....

Give the recent announcement about the imminent demise of CentOS, and the fact I have just deployed a brand new CentOS 8 / Plesk server, what is the official Plesk line on the use of "convert2rhel"?

It's a commercial server, and I am happy to pay a few £hundred for RHEL, however I would prefer to avoid a full re-install.

convert2rhel provides a solution for an in-place migration from CentOS 8 to RHEL 8, but has anyone experience of doing this on a live Plesk box, or is there any comment from Plesk on if this is a recommended route?

Many thanks all.

 

[stkl]

Hi,

I did the conversion between CentOS 8.3 and RHEL 8.3 on a couple of machines recently using the convert2rhel package, two of them running Plesk Obsidian (Web Host and Web Pro, total of ~60 domains). I'm not involved with Plesk in any way, just want to share my personal experience.

Following the KB instructions is's quite straight forward:

• (!) backup (I created an offline snapshot of the VM right before the upgrade)
• do a full package upgrade, if not yet done
• mount the full RHEL 8.3 DVD image and configure the two main repos (rhel-8-baeos, rhel-8-appstream)
• run the conversion script
• reboot
• probably adjust some third-party repo paths, if required

About 2k steps performed by yum. There are some warnings/notices listing "unsupported" packages during the pre-checks, i.e. packages that will not be reinstalled from RH resources. Obviously all Plesk packages are on that list. The wording is not 100% clear, but they will be left untouched by the process.

Running the systems for about 2 months in production now including the Plesk 18.0.32 update. Didn't experience any flaws so far.

I did a dry run on a local VM with Plesk trial and roughly the same packages installed. Recommend to do the same to minimize surprises. Finally it's on your own risk.


Side note: I also converted some development machines to Oracle Linux 8 before (customized centos2ol script, as the official one does not work for OL8). Apparently Plesk also runs fine with minimal modifications. But if RHEL is an option, I'd go the safe way here.

 

[EricRB]

Hi Stkl,
I'm curious as I am planning on doing this. I get that the plesk packages are obviously not updated, but what about after when plesk packages are tied to centos 8 operating system, i.e.,

plesk-dovecot-2.3.14-2.centos.8+p18.0.36.0+t210526.1459.x86_64 for example?

The plesk installation must have to do something after the convert2rhel has finished?

Eric

 

[stkl]

AFAIK there are no dedicated packages for the different EL8 flavors, i.e. RHEL, CentOS and Alma all fetch from {dist,extras,thirdparty}-rpm-CentOS-8-x86_64

Index of /PSA_18.0.36

There used to be "CentOS-6" and "el6" packages, but they are gone since EL7. Hopefully I'm not missing something here, but at least the autoinstaller / upgrade does not complain and the systems run without any issues.