Plesk upgrade, worth it?

[laughingbuddha]

With a new Plesk release on the way, is it really worth the upgrade when it is out?

More to the point, if like me you have a live production server, is it really worth the risk, you is it better to stick the trusty old 8.6?

Matt

[spaceout]

I haven't had any problems with 9.5.2. I usually upgrade much later after the bugs have mostly been squashed. I think there still might be a problem or two with Postfix but that's all I know about.

[faris]

Plesk 10 is a HUGE change. Much bigger than the difference between 8.x and 9.x (IMHO).

Remember that it has taken a really long time for 9.x to become stable and useful. It must be a year or maybe more since 9.x was initially released and it was only when we got to 9.5.2 that things were really usable.

So, although I've been promised by the Plesk powers that be, in public, that thay have listened to the complaints about the pain that the initial 9.x releases caused due to bugs and upgrade failures, and that 10 will be much better in this respect, nobody in their right mind will want to upgrade to Plesk 10 on its initial release, or even on its first two or three.

The new features it provides are, for a change, actually useful and I'm actually quite excited about this version.

So sit tight. Go for 9.5.2+ for the next 12 months (we probably will do so). When 10 is "mature" go for that. Being on the cutting edge has it price and sometimes it is too high to be worth paying.

Faris.

[laughingbuddha]

Thanks Faris.

My worry is that being my only live server at present, I don't want to screw it up during upgrade.
It's a 32bit dual Xeon HP Proliant, and sadly the CPU's won't take 64bit OS (dam it).

I tend to run updates and system maintance after midnight (GMT), but what are the risks in upgrading?

[breun]

what are the risks in upgrading?

It could go 100% fine or you server could die. Or anything in between. Make sure you have backups, test the upgrade on a separate instance, read changelogs and check the various forums for issues being reported. When you're confident, go ahead.

If upgrades are worth it depend on whether the upgrade fixes issues that concern your configuration and whether it has new features that you want. Usually at least one of these things is the case, so I usually install every upgrade. YMMV.

[faris]

One option you might consider is to use a third party to do the upgrade for you. For example we usually get 4PSA to do it for us, but Breun and others also offer a similar service.

When things go wrong (and they do), they know how to fix it 99.9% of the time. They have the experience and expert knowledge needed to turn what would be a disaster at midnight into a few hours of downtime.

Nevertheless, a backup is useful. Just a normal one with all the user data and configuration. In the event of a file system* failure that leads to loss of data during the upgrade, you can still get back to where you were originally within a few hours.

* We had a filesystem go bad on us on one of our servers this week. We use RAID to protect against disk failure, but this can't help you when the actual file system goes bad due to, say a controller glitch or kernel bug or whatever else can cause this. We still don't know the cause of ours. We'll be taking the system down for some thorough diagnostics over the weekend. Luckily what's on it is virtualised so we can just migrate it over to a different server while we do so.

[laughingbuddha]

I still need to sort out a backup. I didn't see the point in virtualising the server as it's extra cost and hassle, besides it is only a dual Xeon 2.8GHz HP Proliant DL360 G3 with 4GB of memory. The two main sites I host, besides the other domains, are built by me and I retain copies of the sites locally. The others are mostly email only domains.

I keep meaning to sort out 4PSA backup for the server, but either time or money has prevented it so far.

I think for the moment I might keep it as Plesk 8.6. It works, and I don't want to run the risk of killing the box by installing Plesk 9. Not just yet.

Matt

[faris]

The 4PSA backup is basically a rather nice wrapper around tar/gz and split, which gets all the important stuff and dumps all the databases.

The built-in Plesk backup facility may be a better option in this particular case. I don't know if it works reliably under 8.6 but I seem to remember terrible problems with earlier versions, where backups didn't restore properly or something to do with backup keys that didn't match or something.

Has anyone here used the Plesk backup recently?

Matt - my thought was that you could use that (or 4PSA) and then copy that backup to a remote location, like cloud storage or whatever. That's one of the backups we do.

Faris.

[faris]

Oh yes, the other option is to upgrade your server. That's what we used to do. Get a new one, all shiney and up to date, running Centos 5 64-bit. Install Plesk with a temporary unlimited key. Migrate customers to that (which is more reliable than an in-place upgrade). If all goes well, switch off old server and change Ips back to what they were on the old server. If it does not...well, investigate what went wrong and try again in a few days.

You can even do a dry run, Migrating each account one at a time to check for errors. If no errors then you know it will work when you do it for real.

[biggles]

The 4PSA backup is basically a rather nice wrapper around tar/gz and split, which gets all the important stuff and dumps all the databases.

The built-in Plesk backup facility may be a better option in this particular case. I don't know if it works reliably under 8.6 but I seem to remember terrible problems with earlier versions, where backups didn't restore properly or something to do with backup keys that didn't match or something.

Has anyone here used the Plesk backup recently?

Matt - my thought was that you could use that (or 4PSA) and then copy that backup to a remote location, like cloud storage or whatever. That's one of the backups we do.

Faris.

Personally I use 4PSA backup and a local cloud server company here in Sweden. I have modified the 4psa scripts to turn on the cloud server, do the backup and transfer it to the cloud server and then shut down the cloud server. Doesn't cost me much to have an off-site backup at all and it works great. If the backup fails 4psa backup sends me an e-mail with the details...

[faris]

At the moment on one of our servers we have 4PSA TotalBackup backing up locally, then we use S3Sync to copy the local backup to Amazon S3. I would prefer native S3 support in TotalBackup, but the 4PSA guys seem to have mostly abandoned develpment on their Plesk utilities in favour of their VoIP product, which is a shame.

Faris.

[BruceLee]

but the 4PSA guys seem to have mostly abandoned develpment on their Plesk utilities in favour of their VoIP product, which is a shame.

I totally agree with that. I'm also disappointed that they only focus on their VOIP products and OpenExchange.
It took months until they fixed an obvious error in 4PSA-client backup and centos5 x86_64.
Also no new features are implemented anymore.
On the other hand the products are good, run and do the job as supposed to and 4PSA helps quickly when errors show up. Maybe they know the roadmap of parallels and most of their plesk products are needless with plesk 10. Who knows ?

[faris]

None of the 4PSA stuff is made redundant by Plesk 10 really, with the exception of the application installer, which was redundant by Plesk 9. There's some overlap with some of the others but again that's been there since Plesk 9.

But nothing at all beats the support you get from 4PSA as long as you are careful with the small language barrier that sometimes causes confusion. They have saved my skin more than once.

Faris.

[laughingbuddha]

Hi faris,

I'm just returning to this thread again after a break. I'm considering my options to upgrade Plesk, and also more importantly get some back up service running. This is mostly because one of my RAID drives is failing, and I'm due to replace it in the next few days.

What would you recommend for backing up, with a face and easy as possible restore solution?

Also, I'm thinking about investing in another server, with a view to running virtuozzo to separate the physical server in virtual slices, mostly for redundancy. I've always favoured running physical servers, compared to virtual servers on a physical machine, because virtual only really safe guards against software failure, not hardware. As running 2 machines in colo situation is costly, and I don't host a great deal of clients (30+ domains), and use my current server mostly for bespoke stuff, development and my own projects, is it worth going the virtual root?

[biggles]

I am using 4psa backup to do a local backup to another harddrive. Then I use the built in ftp option to send it to a standard, cheap, remote web hotel. Cheap solution ($10 per month) which seems to work great so far.