Upgrade to Plesk 10.2 on (mt) DV 4.0?

[jpkelly]

I really want to upgrade my Media Temple dv 4.0 Plesk to v 10.2
Currently I have Plesk 10.1.1 CentOS 5 1010110120.18 to 10.2 on a Virtuozzo 4.0.0 container
Media Temple said:

We are currently running an older version of Virtuozzo Containers than you would need to be able to upgrade to Plesk 10.2. Additionally, we don't have any plans currently to upgrade these Virtuozzo Containers just yet. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Parallels says the the old container wont support IPv6 but that I should be able to upgrade and just not have IPv6 support.

The other possible issues are:

I have installed Parallels Plesk Panel 8.6 Virtuozzo template and I try to upgrade it with the Parallels Plesk Panel 10.2 template, but the upgrade fails with errors like:

Error: Missing Dependency: psa-security = 8.0 is needed by package psa-firewall-1.0.1-cos5.build86080722.00.i586 (plesk8-cs-gs0)
Error: Missing Dependency: psa-security = 8.0 is needed by package psa-firewall-1.0.1-cos5.build86080722.00.i586 (plesk8-psa-vpn0)
Error: Missing Dependency: psa-security = 8.0 is needed by package psa-firewall-1.0.1-cos5.build86080722.00.i586 (plesk8-ppwse0)
Error: Missing Dependency: psa-security = 8.0 is needed by package psa-firewall-1.0.1-cos5.build86080722.00.i586 (plesk8-antivirus0)
Cause
The errors are caused by a bug in yum package manager supplied with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers.
Resolution
Before you start upgrading the Parallels Plesk Panel 8.6 template, install the latest Parallels Virtuozzo Containers tools. Read http://kb.parallels.com/en/11159

kb.parallels.com/en/11159 suggests installing Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux 4.6 tools update

APPLIES TO:
Virtuozzo Containers for Linux 4.6
Release notes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Synopsis: New Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.6 tools update provides
fixes related to Container management functionality.
Issue date: 2011-03-23
Product: Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.6
Keywords: 'Debian' 'EZ template'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...
5. Obtaining Update

You can download and install this tools update using the 'vzup2date' utility
included in the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.6 distribution.

6. Installing Update

Use the 'vzup2date' command to install the new Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
tools packages.

The update does not require Parallels Virtuozzo Containers restart or system
reboot.

7. RPMs required:

The following RPM packages are included in the tools update:

virtuozzo-release-4.6.0-212.i386.rpm
libvznbdmig-4.6.0-25.i386.rpm
nbd-2.9.20-2.i386.rpm
vzctcalc-4.6.0-25.i386.rpm
vzctl-4.6.0-131.i386.rpm
vzctl-lib-4.6.0-131.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv41-4.6.0-8.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv41s9-4.6.0-9.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv43-4.6.0-9.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv44-4.6.0-13.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv46-4.6.0-8.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv47-4.6.0-16.i386.rpm
vzpkgenv48-4.6.0-9.i386.rpm
vzpkgenvdeb-4.6.0-15.i386.rpm
vztt-4.6.0-60.i386.rpm
vztt-lib-4.6.0-60.i386.rpm

Can I install the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux 4.6 tools update?
Does it seem reasonable to attempt to update to Plesk 10.2?
I only have access to the container itself not the VZ environment.

[paulie]

Can I install the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux 4.6 tools update?
Does it seem reasonable to attempt to update to Plesk 10.2?
I only have access to the container itself not the VZ environment.

No, that update is for the node, not for a container, and its an update for (DV) 4.6 which MediaTemple won't provide for you (which is reasonable in my opinion, I've just failed miserably to update an empty node from 4.0 to 4.6).

I can't comment on updating to 10.2 as we have only 3 customers using Plesk 10 on VPS (out of 300), certainly I like some of the features arriving in Plesk 10.2, and its only (AFAIK) the ipv6 support that you would be missing. Assuming you have the facilities and your daring enough you may be able to upgrade using the autoinstaller (/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/autoinstaller) and bypass the Virtuozzo templates, however I would not recommend doing this unless you can backup/restore your entire container. And its also possible that mediatemple are piping the autoinstaller through the Virtuozzo templates.

Paul.

[jpkelly]

No, that update is for the node, not for a container, and its an update for (DV) 4.6 which MediaTemple won't provide for you (which is reasonable in my opinion, I've just failed miserably to update an empty node from 4.0 to 4.6).

And its also possible that mediatemple are piping the autoinstaller through the Virtuozzo templates.

I understand that the node update wont work because it is for the node not the container.

What I don't understand is the concept of Virtuozzo templates or how the autoinstaller command would be piped through a template.
Can you explain?

[paulie]

Unfortunately its a long and boring explanation.

Virtuozzo isn't virtualization in the same way that Vmware, Xen and KVM are. Its presented as OS Virtualization rather than hardware Virtualization, so its pretending to be an OS.

This is because of the way it works, which is that essentially its just a chroot environment within the hardware node, and this is why you have no access to kernel modules or are able to make kernel changes, because the kernel is shared between all the containers and nodes (this is also why you can't virtualize linux on Windows and vice versa with Virtuozzo). As a by the by, I've been working with Virtuozzo for 2 years, but I have known of a company (www.openhosting.com) that have sold VPS's based on this kind of technology for quite a long time, and oddly enough its this kind of OS virtualization that is being pushed into the Linux kernel for the future. This is because its more efficient than the other types.

Anyway, all this is background to explain that unlike with Xen and KVM (I think), with Virtuozzo I can be the root user on the node and I can cd into your container's filespace and have a look around at all your files whilst your container is running happily because there's no pseudo drive/filesystem, and because you're not pretending to be an entire server there's a lot less overhead involved in running a Virtuozzo container versus a Xen dom (?).

Virtuozzo then tries to improve the contention further by symbolic linking common files between containers. Basically your initial install of Centos onto a Virtuozzo container is just a ton of symbolic links, all linking out to the binaries and shared libraries within the templates directory. This helps to save space (just about everyone will have Apache installed, whats the point of having 30 or so copies of the binary when you can have one copy and symlink it), but it also helps to save memory usage, since they can all share the shared libraries in memory. Meaning you can put even more containers onto your node (and hopefully make more money).

This is what Virtuozzo templates do, they push the install of software via the node and its template directories and symlinks, thereby ensuring you get the maximum benefit. This is why some providers don't provide yum at all in a container, because if someone yum updates, they break the benefits of the templates, whereas if it goes through the Power Panel, they don't.

Parallels also provide another tool called vzaproxy that you can put on your servers, it intercepts calls from the autoinstaller script and pushes them to the nodes template directories and symlinks so that people aren't installing many multiple instances of the updated Plesk versions. If mediatemple use this then its possible that the template issues you get updating, you will still get using the autoinstaller. I've never used this so I can't tell you anymore about it. We allow both yum and the autoinstaller and take the hit because of the freedom it provides users.

If we were better organised we'd be running scheduled scripts that scour the containers for duplicate files and converts them into templates to improve performance, but we're not unfortunately!

I hope this helps to explain things, though it doesn't necessarily help you get any further,

[jpkelly]

Thanks for taking the time to explain this.
I think I get the template idea now. I'm not sure to what extent Media Temple uses symlinks. I think Apache and other services are independent of the other nodes and can be updated. They do allow yum, so I have hope that I will be able to upgrade.
I purchased a snapshot backup so I can restore if it all goes wrong.
This is a scary proposition because this is a production server, but I might do a late night attempt.
Will post the results if I do....