Input Plesk with Centralized File Storage (based on NFS)

[AYamshanov]

Server operating system version

Ubuntu 22.04

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.50

Hi everyone,

Probably, you have noticed this improvement in Change Log for Plesk Obsidian (Linux):

- Using NFS shares to store hosted websites’ vhost directories is now supported. To enable this feature, add the following lines to the panel.ini file:
[webserver]
syncModeOnRemoveConfiguration = true

We also have prepared a blog post on how to deploy and configure remote database and Plesk to start using the feature,

• Plesk with Centralized Database and Network File System.

I am interested to collect feedback on what do you think about possibility to use a centralized file storage with NFS access for Plesk servers. Is it valuable feature for you or not, would you like to start using it in your production environment or not? Why?
If you want to use the centralized file storage feature and something stops you, what blocks you from start using?
I would appreciate any feedback.

 

[pleskweb]

It is a feature that I was asking for a long time. Being an MSP where service assurance is a must, this will facilitate our customers websites reliability and availability. I can now deploy a Plesk HA without having to worry about data management and replication with multiple Plesk instances accessing the same content as this is covered by the storage cluster which now can serve websites from NFS volumes. I can even envisage that low cost webhosters will appreciate this functionality.

 

[Alcor]

HI,
I am mainly interested in this feature for VM/OS migrations with Migrator; however how should it be used to avoid copying vhosts (when migrating from a server whose vhosts are already on NFS) ?
And what is NFS specific in this approach ? I don't have example yet but imagine I use another Network File System that can be mount on the file system and that keep user/group/permissions.

 

[AYamshanov]

Hi Alcor,

We have not tested using NFS storage as a part of a Plesk Migration process from one server to another. I even not sure that it will work, to be honest. The configuration where a few Plesk servers use the same directory on the NFS server is not supported. If you want to use a single NFS server with a few Plesk servers, each server should have a dedicated directory on NFS storage. If you have the same domain on different Plesk servers, domains data should not be saved in the same directory (to avoid overwriting data from one server by data from another server).

We have tested how Plesk works with NFS and we can say that it is supported (during the tests we also fix a few issues that could cause db inconsystency). We have not tested any other filesystems. Probably, they will work work too but we can't be sure. If you use non-NFS network filesystem and face with an issue that disallow Plesk to work correctly, the Plesk Support team will not able to help.

 

[Alcor]

Thanks for your reply.
First, I understand that each Plesk server should have a dedicated folder on the NFS server (or maybe for security reasons : as many NFS exports as Plesk servers).
I also understand Plesk support won't help on alternative network file system.
But I'm sure you'll make sysops happy if you support NFS in Migrator. Imagine I just mount (fstab) existing NFS export on my new Plesk server and launch Migrator : plesk configurations/domains configurations/accounts/databases/... will be copied, but not vhosts ! In my case, that's several TB, and therefore many many hours of synchronization during which the sites are not operational. This is not so far from your HA Cluster has to achieve among other things to work.

 

[AYamshanov]

Thank you, Alcor, for the idea, yes, it sound reasonable. I will share it with the team responsible for the migrator.