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Issue Real frustation while migrating to new server

layerwire

Basic Pleskian
Long story:
I hope Plesk team will notice this feedback and make a positive change in near future. Because it's going to be easier to change control panel then migrate from Plesk Onyx to Plesk Onyx.

We planned migration for our shared hosting on 02/07. Before that, we tried to test migration tool and check if we are going to face any issues. There was plenty of small issues, but we manage to fix it with Plesk help articles. Everything was looking okay, but oh boy, we were so wrong.

Of course, before migration we send out for all shared hosting clients email's with a warning about migration and asking clients not to make any changes, till migration is over, which is going to take around 24 hours. For us sync takes around 12 hours, that's why we took a little bit more time, just in case.

After the first sync, we started post-migration and we got some new issues. Support team gave us the advice to wait till post-migration is over. Post-migration check took 3 days, so we had to inform all clients again via email and apologize about issues with migration.

Now we setup new server with Plesk Onyx again, just in case. Sync all subs and try to switch DNS for one of them, just for test. This time we are more careful. So we are checking everything twice. But we are getting an unknown error and ask Plesk team what is going on and why we can't change DNS for one sub for the test.

After several days support team confirms that developers found 2 bugs with migration PMT-3845 and PMT-3846.
In the end, support team says we need to switch DNS with hands and everything should work fine. So, we are sending emails to inform our clients again that migration is going to happen on 13/07. Hoping for best.

After sync, we are getting new issues again, but we manage to fix some of them by our team. Later we report a new issue with DNS switching, shortly after developers confirm bug PMT-1847 if both servers have same system administrator username.

Well we have around 12 hours before we *should* start the migration, but the issue with migration is still not fixed. In the end, we didn't manage to make migration on 13/07, because of issues with Slave DNS.
DNS issues got fixed on Friday, but more issues came along. Cron jobs didn't migrate from the old server, and Plesk team had to do it with hands. I can't imagine what could happen if we had around 100 cron tasks.

Shortly, after successful migration, we getting reports from users with authorization issues via WHMCS. After migration, it was not possible to log in via WHMCS and we had to explain the situation for clients and resend auth information. But it got fixed pretty fast in around 8 hours.

Summary brief:
- Did we try to make migration at least 3 times? I am not sure how many times we tried it in the end.
- We had to inform our clients 3 times via emails to just say "Sorry migration was not possible, due issues". Top notch customer experience there.
- We faced at least 3 new bugs while migrating to the new server which got confirmed by developers PMT-3845, PMT-3846, PMT-1847.
- We faced issues with DNS switch/slave, cron jobs and billing automation.
- 4 tickets. I will post here ID's 47576, 50147, 50149 and 49989.
- Migration took 13 days.

Feedback:
Make migration BETTER. In all aspects. First question why you can't sync all Plesk Onyx settings to another? We had to make a lot of changes with our hands and it took some time. Why it's so buggy? It feels like we are first people in the world who was using this migration tool. We used other control panels before we moved to Plesk Onyx, and we had zero issues with migrations.

I made this long post because I care about Plesk Onyx and we want to continue using Plesk Onyx. Migration tool is extremely important for us (and for all other hosting providers. I hope right people will see this post. Otherwise, we are going to think again, if we should choose another control panel or suffer from same problems again.

P.S Sorry for my bad English would appreciate if someone could fix all my issues :oops:
 
Hi @NVK,

First of all, thank you for the time you’ve spent on such detailed feedback, we really appreciate. It’s very useful to see the whole perfectly structured story from customer’s point of view to make our product better. Based on your experience and feedback we submitted 3 new issues (that you mentioned here) + new Improvement Request (PMT-3854), all of them will go to one of the nearest Migrator updates.

Now let me drill down into details with mentioned issues.

“Switch DNS” Issue
This was related to network infrastructure and not accurate enough error handling in Plesk Migrator, when source Plesk server works behind NAT. In some configurations, this leads to the inability of API-RPC usage from destination Plesk server.
At this point, Migrator stuck without any way to re-run the operation. We are going to implement the more robust communication way for Switch DNS functionality and improve error handling. (PMT-3845 + PMT-3846)

Long run of post-migration checks
It was also related to network configuration behind NAT. Post-migration check tries to access migrated web-site’s pages using public IP address, not a private one. It seems that in your environment this ended with connection timeouts and unacceptably long overall execution time. We are going to improve this case handling (New improvement request: PMT-3854)

Issue with system users conflict
Pretty clear, we will fix (PMT-1847)

Issue with the cronjobs migration
This requires additional investigation. Sure, cronjobs must be migrated. I will update you on this point as soon as we will identify issue conditions.

Server Settings Migration
In general, this is in our roadmap already. It will be really useful if you provide me with the most painful settings that are not migrated from your point of view (so I can adjust the priorities properly)
Item for your reference: PPM-2108

Again, thanks for your patience and collaboration!
Best Regards,
 
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