Input Virtuozzo Linux (VZLinux) 8 - Supported OS

[HHawk]

@admin - the most important reason here is that AlmaLinux is NOT supported as an OS by Virtuozzo. Say you are preventing Virtuozzo users from continuing to use Plesk ... (and more & more are now/near future migrating their Centos 7 Servers ...)

We have always used Virtuozzo as virtualization software with Plesk as the front end for our customers ...

Until now, although VzLinux existed, we only ever used Centos as the OS under Plesk, simply because it was defacto standard. Now that you can no longer use Centos, this will change.

Especially when you see what measures Virtuozzo is taking to make it easy for us administrators to switch to VzLinux. (See the comments from @mbroemme )

And please consider - there is no extra work for you to give VzLinux to the supported OS. since both VzLinux and AlmaLinux are binary compatible to Red Hat Enterprise. Say both are technically equivalent for Plesk ... say it would already work out of the Box ... it's just not officially supported ... which means one can't use it as Plesk would decline any Support if there are Problems within Plesk ...

Plesk... or better put; Oakley Capital, does not like this "extra" work and they also do not care about their customers.
As a matter of fact; I expect that there will be a new price increase (again) sooner than later with Plesk or any other piece of software that this investment company has acquired; like WHMCS early this month. This resulted in a gigantic loss of users (e.g. licenses).

Oh well. The future of the hosting business looks dim in the wake of investment companies like Oakley Capital... Sighs.

 

[hostingprimus]

Plesk is a money greedy company, after Oakley Capital took over. Period.
We had a big meeting with our team and CEO today because of Plesk, Plesk support and Plesk pricing in general. We are going to cancel our 200+ licenses. This was enough. We are fed up with the pathetic support, a product where only nonsense is being added and support has become terrible.

Sidenote; because of this we will save 4000 / 5000 Euro per month.

We are using Plesk on about 300 Machines. I fully agree with what you are saying. Maybe we could get in contact. I'd like to know which alternative you chose.

Absolutely ridiculous...

Some years ago we had huge expenditures to switch all our Machines and Containers from Confixx to Plesk - virtualized through Virtuozzo. Back then undoubtedly a good decision because Plesk was terrific and brilliantly thought out.

Pleskians then waited for enough customers to come aboard and - out of the blue - changed plans and pricing. (felt like being blackmailed already). Subsequently more and more essential features and useful functions only available through paid extensions.

And now, as every hoster is already struggling what to do since Redhat messed things up with CentOS, Pleskians come along and show the middle finger to all customers (in particular those users who completely rely on Virtuozzo).

Regarding the outgoing amount of money, just for Plesk Licenses, ist's simply frustrating to see how we have been part of their growth from the beginning! It feels more and more like now we are taken on hsotage by Plesk and have to eat literally every sh** they bring upon us.

 

[korsar]

@admin - the most important reason here is that AlmaLinux is NOT supported as an OS by Virtuozzo. Say you are preventing Virtuozzo users from continuing to use Plesk ... (and more & more are now/near future migrating their Centos 7 Servers ...)

This aspect was not taken into account by me, I just considered support of VzLinux as support of separate OS from the Virtuozzo team. Now, taking into account a customer base, who use CentOS 7 under Virtuozzo, we should reconsider support for VzLinux 8.
Thank you for your patience and clarification. We'll update you soon.

 

[weltonw]

Does OpenVZ support Rocky? I presume Plesk will support that.

CentOS/RHEL7 to 8, or any major v. upgrade is already possible. You just break a lot of stuff. You would almost certainly require Plesk to support it in order for it to properly work.

As far as Web Pros/Oakley goes - I've used DA/Interworx among others. Unfortunately, there frankly isn't anything on par with Plesk/cPanel (and I suspect Plesk/Web Pros know this). DirectAdmin's documentation is an absolute mess. Even more so than Plesk's extension API. As is the UI, which would probably cost many more man-hours to customize + maintain.

Given the amount of time & hand-holding we've had to set aside to point out product issues/bugs (among other areas that are lacking), I can't say I'm very happy though.

Hopefully, something good comes out of this =)

 

[korsar]

Does OpenVZ support Rocky? I presume Plesk will support that.

At least we are already considering it and did a preliminary evaluation of the support cost. Now we are observing trends from customers' side and/or some tiggers, which will drive the necessity to support it.

 

[futureweb]

At least we are already considering it and did a preliminary evaluation of the support cost. Now we are observing trends from customers' side and/or some tiggers, which will drive the necessity to support it.

@korsar - RockyLinux is a "complete binary-compatible" clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just like AlmaLinux, VzLinux and some others ... In other words, the support effort / support costs should not (or only minimally) increase if you declare a general support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux + all Binary Compatible Clones. (Support RHEL - support all)
This would probably be the best for everyone involved ... Your Customers can choose their "favorite Linux distri" and you have happier customers for no additional effort ...

What would the general contradiction in terms of simply supporting all Binary Compatible RHEL Clones?

Andy

ps) The best thing about it? You could let it happen within minutes ... since you already officially support RHEL 8, all Binary Compatible Clones are already running flawlessly ...

 

[futureweb]

@HHawk - could we keep this thread on topic, please? So this is about VzLinux 8 (+ possibly similiar Binary Compatible distributions) and not about general ranting via Plesk, their price and their licensing policy ... thank you! ;-)

 

[HHawk]

Why? I was replying to john0001's answer. DirectAdmin has come a long way (in terms of interface and documentation) and their pricing is still way better than Plesk. Plesk could learn something from that.

Also DA supports VzLinux 8! So that is pretty on-topic. If you do not like it, then simply do not respond. Thank you! ;-0

 

[HHawk]

@Igor pretty pathetic to remove posts. I just compared products, that's not advertising.

Plesk is really becoming a bad product with excessive pricing and power hungry staff. Also first it's stated VzLinux 8 is supported, then not (even in support tickets) and now it's becoming supported (again)? Really. Make up your mind instead of telling your customers nonsense. I am still a paying customer with over 200+ Plesk licenses.

However that amount will surely decline after the past few weeks and the meeting we had with our team and CEO about this. And deleting my posts about this will not help this fact. Or are you paid by Oakley Capital directly? ;-0

 

[IgorG]

@HHawk, I understand that you are unhappy. But as a forum administrator, I ask you to control yourself, remove emotions from your messages and return to the topic. Thanks.

 

[HHawk]

No worries IgorG, I can control my emotions (in typed messages) pretty well! Have been doing so the past 4 or 5 years dealing with Plesk in general. I would have placed a smiley here, but apparently that's not allowed anymore?

Maybe if Plesk would actually listen to their long-standing customers (almost 20 years) and invest their time, like you do in posting and removing posts on the forum, this thread would have never existed and no "emotional" posts would have needed to be made. And Plesk would support VzLinux 8.x without any issues and Varnish 6.x as well directly from Plesk.

Ah, I know. Wishful thinking. I will stop posting "off-topic" comments and we can start again on the fact if VzLinux 8.x is being supported or not actually. Because the last few times it got from "planned" to "scratched" and now it's becoming planned once again. No clue what to believe anymore...

In the support ticket two (different) Plesk support employees stated that VzLinux 8 would not get supported. Virtuozzo support says completely the opposite and says they are talking to your department's developers, but nobody knows something and you are getting different stories. So I find it hard to believe that Plesk is taking their customers seriously. Probably it's not profitable to listen to your customers and simply add VzLinux 8.x support in general?

Oh well, we will see what Plesk will do in the upcoming few weeks. It shouldn't be that hard to support VzLinux 8 or any other RHEL 8 based distro imho. All are almost identical, it's just what Plesk wants to do for their customers in general.

Sidenote; I am taking screenshots in case my posts (which are on-topic) get removed again and I am forced to take this a level up.

 

[korsar]

@korsar - RockyLinux is a "complete binary-compatible" clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just like AlmaLinux, VzLinux and some others ... In other words, the support effort / support costs should not (or only minimally) increase if you declare a general support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux + all Binary Compatible Clones. (Support RHEL - support all)

It's just half of the truth

If we consider an in-place upgrade for base OS installation, yes it works. But in a fact, even AlmaLinux needed to spend additional efforts to support upgrade with Plesk installed. The same is actual for any 3rd party package/repo.
Our colleagues from cPanel have already observed an experience with an in-place upgrade from CentOS 7 to VzLinux 8 and it works for base OS installation, but it still works unstable when 3rd party packages are installed.

 

[weltonw]

> If we consider an in-place upgrade for base OS installation, yes it works. But in a fact, even AlmaLinux needed to spend additional efforts to support upgrade with Plesk installed. The same is actual for any 3rd party package/repo.
Our colleagues from cPanel have already observed an experience with an in-place upgrade from CentOS 7 to VzLinux 8 and it works for base OS installation, but it still works unstable when 3rd party packages are installed.

That's absolutely true, though arguably a different concept altogether (in place major upgrades vs just supporting VZLinux).

> Why? I was replying to john0001's answer. DirectAdmin has come a long way (in terms of interface and documentation) and their pricing is still way better than Plesk. Plesk could learn something from that.

I'll give them that, sure, but they've still got a long way to go. I don't know about you, but the cost of rewriting all policies/security audits/bootstrapping/benchmarking/extensions/etc is a very considerable cost to factor in, which are impeded by DA's quirks. Pricing is a very important factor, but I don't think the same price forever would be a reasonable expectation for any product. Having said that, cPanel/WHMCS per account pricing was rather ridiculous, and I duly hope Plesk doesn't go down the same route.

 

[futureweb]

@korsar - if there was the possibility of an in-place upgrade from Centos 7 to VzLinux 8 this would of course be a great thing. If I consider how many Centos 7 + Plesk servers we have running or other hosters in our environment ... this would save a lot of time and problems if there were a direct upgrade path instead of the complete Migration Path would have to go ...
As I understand it, Virtuozzo is definitely interested in offering corresponding upgrade paths here, without Plesk this always exists. Maybe something can be done together here ...

I hope that in the end a good solution comes out for all the Virtuozzo Virtualization users ... ;-)

 

[futureweb]

ps) but in the event that there is no in-place upgrade, the pure support of VzLinux would be an acceptable way ... and that should actually be possible without much effort on your part (as of the RHEL binary clone)
The point here is that Plesk Support does not simply reject every ticket with the reason "Unsupported OS" ...

 

[Dave W]

From Virtuozzo VzLinux 8.4 Now Available

• A tool to upgrade CentOS 7 directly to VzLinux 8, available at: GitHub - vzlinux/vzupgrade: A tool for upgrading Vz instances to next major release

 

[futureweb]

Hello, everyone,
I wanted to inquire whether there has been any progress here?
I have a few customers who would like to upgrade from their Centos 7 servers to a RHEL 8 compatible OS (e.g. due to TLS 1.3 support)
As long as they don't use Plesk, it's not a problem. Put VZLinux 8 on our Virtuozzo cluster and get it on ... but as soon as Plesk is in the game it gets a little more complicated ... I really don't want to switch to Debian or something like that because all our scripts are geared towards RHEL-compatible OS ...
But at the moment there is no RHEL 8 (except RHEL itself) compatible system that is supported by both Virtuozzo and Plesk ...
... in other words, at the moment we have no choice but to put our customers off and communicate that we are unfortunately dependent on "external factors" ... :-(
I really hope that this will end in a positive way ...
Best regards from Tyrol
Andreas S.

 

[WEBER.cloud]

Hey Plesk, you are kidding, aren´t you? Of course VzLinux has no market share yet because every hoster which uses CentOS 8 still is using CentOS 8 until the end of the support in December. But then every hoster has to switch to a new RHEL clone. And for VZ users the best choice of course is VzLinux.

If you do not support it we probably will have to switch to another control panel. We run about 250-300 Plesk instances! We love Plesk and we love Virtuozzo - but we need support from both sides (VZ and Plesk!).

 

[Boindil]

As much as I hope that this will turn out to end in VzLinux 8 to be supported, I dont think Plesk will stick to that ..

For now we're sticking with AlmaLinux - which does have some serious issues - after reboot there are files missing in /run for example in my case - httpd, php-fpm dont come up. And yes, proper reboot via ssh.

Currently we're also considering other control panels - we definitely had enough of this stupid nonsense. Plesk is only increasing prices and decreasing customer care!

 

[Dave W]

VZLinux7 is listed as a supported OS for Plesk Obsidian, why then would you not support VZLinux8?