Synchronize Plesk Servers (Failover)
Keep two (or more) Plesk servers in sync for a failover scenario.
Migration Manager only allows manual "sync"
Ralph Keck
shared this idea
Although the implemented solution differs from the initial demand, we are closing the request as "already available”. We have thoroughly investigated the idea to solve the redundancy issue using a Plesk cluster. Our research has proved that this solution is not in step with the times, is no longer demanded by our partners, and has its limitations. We would like to give an explanation of each point.
More than nine years ago, when the request was created, the IT world had already begun to change. Previously, partners and customers bought or rented bare-metal servers and organized them in data centers. If the servers did not have sufficient component redundancy, there was a risk that a power supply or hard drive failure would lead to service downtime. However, a synchronized failover server could save hosting from such problems. But since then, hosting infrastructure has changed significantly. These days, public clouds are everywhere, partners and customers use virtualization systems, and software runs in containers.
We interviewed our partners to make sure they still needed a high-availability (failover) cluster for Plesk. It turned out that the majority of partners already had virtualization systems in their infrastructure. To protect a server with Plesk from failures, many partners already use high-availability features provided by virtualization systems. Some partners are no longer interested in a high-availability (failover) cluster. Instead, they would like to have a high-load cluster with active/active nodes, where the load is balanced between all cluster members.
In the meantime, we tried building a Plesk cluster. It proved to be possible but with many limitations. A Plesk cluster also requires more servers and resources for deployment from partners and customers, which leads to increased infrastructure costs. The solution would be unreasonably expensive for end users. Developing a Plesk cluster further and making it suitable for production requires lots of additional investments. They will not justify themselves from the point of view of our partners, customers, end users, and Plesk itself. Should anyone decide to continue the research on how to adapt Plesk to be a part of a failover cluster, we have published our research results together with the proof of concept. If you have any feedback, we have created a topic about high availability Plesk on our forum.
Note: We recommend using a centralized database and centralized file storage (NFS) together with virtualization systems and/or cloud providers that provide high-availability functionality on the server rather than the software level. At the same time, we do not plan to continue developing any high-availability redundancy on the application level.
— AY
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Alexander Maassen commented
Well, if it's just email, just coded something for this in php ;)
The only thing you need to change is the source from where it should copy stuff.
Obviously only works on debian/ubuntu flavour servers and yes, it needs root (because of the file permissions for the files it needs to read to connect to the db/get the key)See http://pastebin.com/gKgH5XYe for more details
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Jay Owen
commented
just adding my 2 cents-
we've had to move away from plesk in some of our hosting efforts so we can have better HA.
we've had to build large clustered web systems, which is not ideal.
we lose the primary tools our customers have grown to love, and our staff understands: plesk.
we would love to see some solution around plesk being clustered.
if we had a this, it would allow us to shutdown a plesk node, and keep the services up- we would probably drop our complex beast in favor for it.
there are many options, and we've even done labs to see if we could trick plesk into being this way. We fault at IP failover, there's not an easy way to create a floating IP setup.
We have looked at software load balancer to address this- but to make the whole thing slick, and keep the plesk updates flowing we would need a vendor-supported solution- so we stopped in our efforts.
For future reference (if needed), we were looking at this: http://securityrouter.org/
the interface is easy enough for most plesk admins, or IT generalists to deploy and use.
Hopefully you guys will get this feature up and running one day! -
Ralph Keck
commented
@Odin: there are many people waiting for a feature like this. Can we expect it in a narrower future?
Kind Regards,
Ralph Keck -
Snoopy
commented
That would be a great feature ... for a better sleeping...
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Elompenta
commented
If Plesk has his own failover Sync - we will use plesk instead of other Hosting Solutions.
Please add this functionality
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Cees van Dongen
commented
For the same reasons as already mentioned I am in need for the same sceduling functionality. Sergey please put this in your prio list.
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Louis.S
commented
Set Plesk compatible to load-balancing
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Elompenta
commented
Need automatic failover too!
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Anonymous
commented
Need failover scenario in Plesk !!
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H.K
commented
This would perhaps also be good in a load balancer situation.
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Anonymous
commented
A lot of this can be done with the command line tools, such as "migrate", I believe. (Haven't done this for real myself but I don't see why it wouldn't work.)
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Argos
commented
Yes, an automatic scheduler for migration Manager would be very handy. Right now I operate a fall back shadow VPS for my main VPS. It has the same content and same Plesk config, although the hardware specs are budget type. But it works fine, just a bit slower. In case of severe problems of my main VPS I can switch DNS for all sites on it, and within short time all sites run from my shadow VPS.
A month ago this scenario actually happened to me, when my VPS had problems, and totally crashed when I tried to fix them. I quickly switched DNS to the shadow VPS, and my clients never noticed a thing. Then I just rebuild the main VPS and at night I used Migration Manager to put all Plesk content from my shadow VPS back to the main one.
An automatic scheduler would be a great feature!
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Yes, we have some thoughts in this regards, but frankly it is not our top priority yet.
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Anonymous
commented
@Odin: are there any plans in this direction?
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Snoopy
commented
Great Feature!!!!
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Ralph Keck
commented
as I understand, Plesk Automation supports distributed roles (i.e db server, web server etc.) but no synchronization between servers. What I am looking for is an automated sync that I can easily switch DNS entries to change to my backup system without loosing too much changes, emails...
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John Shiells
commented
this can be done using there virtual product and there storage engine
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Chabi01
commented
agree with this : working like a rsync for selectable part of the server to simplify, all this triggable in a cron job (yes, it can be done with a Rsync, but this can be great to simplify all).
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Ralph Keck
commented
An automation or scheduling Plesk Migration Manager jobs might do it for me.
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Ralph Keck
commented
It would be fine, if at least all Plesk content could be synced.
