Migration from 6.0 to 8.0.1 + 2 questions

[mrpopo]

Hello all.
First post to this board, I've been browsing the board for a while and thought I'd post a message to inform and update you guys of our migration from one server to another.

First I'll give you an overview on our current situation:

Machine "A":
Plesk 6.0.2
FreeBSD 4.8
1903 Domains
25 Clients

Machine "B":
Plesk 8.0.1
Debian Sarge 2.6.16 kernel

Next thursday night I'll be migrating everything from machine "A" to machine "B" using the migration manager on machine "B". I'll be posting updates as we go in this thread, hoping to help others who are going through the same progress, and just to give general information back to the community.

I've read alot of posts of people complaining about errors while migrating, I'll take those posts to see if we have anything similar happen to us, and if so I'll post the solution here.

In the meantime I would like your opinions on a couple of things. We would like to integrate some sort of billing application in our new plesk installation. Are there any recomendations you would gve, any third party modules that do the job?

Also we have a lot of customers who would like to have Joomla as their CMS. I've read a lot of posts saying that joomla and plesk just don't get along. Is there anyone here who has this working, and if so, how did you do it? And is there a way to integrate Joomla into plesk like mambo is integrated?

Kind Regards,
I'll keep you guys posted!

Mr. PoPo

 

[phoenixisp]

You may have issues using the Migration Manager. Although touted as being able to, migration of unlike versions of Plesk has created problems. I have found it works better when versions match (PSA8 - PSA8) Good luck.

For billing, you can't beat Modernbill (http://www.moderngigabyte.com/modernbill/index.htm) as it can automate all facets of your hosting business. It has a Plesk plugin that allows customers to purchase a hosting plan and the package is setup on your server. And it has plugins for most credit card and 3rd party processors.

If you have the Application Vault you can add Joomla. In fact, Mambo is now only available through the Vault. While Plesk doesn't offer it directly, ART has added Joomla to his yum project.

 

[jens.jensen]

I have completed migrating from a PSA6/RHEL3 to PSA8.0.1/FC4 box using PMM. I have had several problems, which required having my hosting provider get SWsoft involved.

After several rounds of hotfixes and patches being applied to plesk, it appears that all of my issues have been worked out. If you do have problems with PMM and you are sure that there is no possible issue on your end, I would HIGHLY recommend contact SWsoft support about them.


J

 

[mrpopo]

The big day

Well, Today's the big day.

We've got everything prepared, and are starting the migration as of 17.00 (GMT+1)
So not for another 6 and a half hours.

I'll keep you guys posted, and I've got the plesk support service notified of our situation and availble at any time!

I'll keep you guys posted!

For billing, you can't beat Modernbill (http://www.moderngigabyte.com/modernbill/index.htm) as it can automate all facets of your hosting business. It has a Plesk plugin that allows customers to purchase a hosting plan and the package is setup on your server. And it has plugins for most credit card and 3rd party processors.

I'll check this out asap! Thanks for the tip!

Mr.Popo

 

[mrpopo]

The migration started

Well,
we'ver started migration. No problems as of yet, transfered 8 out of 1903 domains.

Keep you guys posted!

 

[mrpopo]

update

here we are, only 6 domains left to migrate, and the migration manager fails and gives an error "out of memory" (twice).

Too bad, I was realy hoping for a smooth ride. But hey, a sysadmin's live just isn't that simple

We've contacted plesk support, who told us to do a manual migration as described in http://faq.swsoft.com/article_68_1152_en.html which made our mysql server very unhappy. It crashed. We killed all instances of mysql, and restarted it, then we re-ran the migration agent and it seems to be holding up now.

After the "dump" is moved we'll import it through the plesk interface on the new server and hope for the best.

If anything happens we'll let you know.

 

[jens.jensen]

double check to be sure that all users (domain, web) and stuff like mailbox and html content got moved over...

I had several domains that appeared to transfer over (and were "successful") but really failed to migrate certain things like web and mailbox content, and on others domain and web users.... etc


Glad to hear that it has gone so smoothly for you...

It appears that things go smoothly for some and for others it's a total nightmare...

With some prodding to swsoft (and two weeks past my scheduled cutover date from my old server) they were able to hotfix/patch plesk 8 on my new server enough to where everything would migrate...

 

[mrpopo]

Failed migration, migrating at a later time

After 3 failed migrations, 2 because of a lack of memory on the source server, and one because of an overheating problem on the destination server we decided to call it a night and went home. Too bad really, because we were looking forward to using the new plesk and all the new features.

the fourth time we decided to migrate one client at a time, wich was going very well, but due to the lack of time we were unable to complete the migration and had to cancel the whole thing.

Anyway, I've contacted plesk support to send us another license key so we can perform the update at a later time.

I guess I'll keep posting in this thread next time we're going to attempt a migraton!

Mr.PoPo

 

[0031]

mrpopo, tell me please - do you observe out of memory errors on the source or destination server?

 

[mrpopo]

mrpopo, tell me please - do you observe out of memory errors on the source or destination server?

The errors were observed on the destination machine, but originated on the source machine.

It ran out of memmory when trying to mysqldump one of our larger clients.


Mr. PoPo

 

[mrpopo]

Hard work paid off

Ladies and gentlemen,

All the hard work paid off!
We've succesfully upgraded our plesk installation while migrating to a stronger and better server!
I must say, it took some planning! I advise anyone who is still looking into upgrading from plesk 6 to 8.0 to plan ahead.

We've migrated over 50 clients, with a combined total of more then 3000 domains in roughly 17 hours. The only problems we ran in to this time were some mailinglist problems (as it appears mailman wasn't set up correctly) and some register_global problems which have all been fixed.

The first step was to use the migration manager to move all the objects from the old server to the new one, one client at a time to make sure our old machine wouldn't run out of memory again.
After that (it took about 90% of the time) we ran some scripts that changed the IP addresses of the new machine into those of the old machine, updated the database with this data, and arp-released our router
Then we started manual checking of each domain transfered.

I must say, using plesk 8 is a true relieve! No more BSD, no more hassle with software upgrades, just smooth sailing on debian!

Anyone with detailed questions about how we pulled this off, what we prepared, or information on our custom scripts that did the job, please feel free to reply in this topic or send me a PM.

[edit]
More tips concerning billing software/plugins and integrating joomla into plesk 8 will be greatly appreciated!!
[/edit]

Regards,
Mr. PoPo