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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test
commented
I would love to have this, or on site level. lets say you build a site and active sync this to another server.
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Jan Bludau commented
Put this Option in your paid extension! is automatic also available ?
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Thomas
commented
Automationsettings for DB replication between two Plesk servers to have a live backup or a second DB Server for Performance resons.
I could even imagine to use the upcoming Cloudflare loadbalancing function and two Pleskserver for higher performance or just high availability.
THX
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Noam Harel
commented
cluster is crucial, we need that option. also the ability to have more concurrent connections.
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i agree this would be a very nice "why using plesk?" answer.
this sync would always be a nice functional backup.
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Andreas Hagberg
commented
If there would be a failover functionality in Plesk, we would most probably choose this solution for hosting 15 000 hosting accounts. But, it does not and failover/cluster is a must for us.
Let me know when you have the functionality in place ;-)
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Robbie
commented
Anxious to see the new plesk multi-server roll out fully in 17, but this would dramatically improve our ability to host sites in a highly available manner, even when they are already hosted on Azure or AWS. I'd vote 5 times if I could.
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pelo
commented
would be great
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Elompenta
commented
not needed anymore - i have created my own Sync Solution with Failover
If you Need some Solutions for Failover, let me know via Email -
TronNort
commented
i wish this Feature would be on top of your todo-list ...
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leeladhar
commented
Please can you tell me, are you resolved user data issues for plesk clustering. I want to also deploy cluster with plesk but issue is that how to mange users details after failover.
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leeladhar
commented
Please can you tell me, are you resolved user data issues for plesk clustering. I want to also deploy cluster with plesk but issue is that h
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Christian Schmela
commented
That would be brilliant !
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Randall
commented
I would love to see something like this. Maybe this could be accomplished by allowing at installation time the option to have the PSA and Website files/databases assigned to a separate location, possibly a Percona DB cluster and NFS file storage cluster. Then each subsequent plesk server could connect to the common storage cluster...
Obviously a lot of other details to figure out regarding pushing updates to all nodes without breaking the cluster, IP addressing issues, etc...
But this would be a great feature for ensuring that your services stay online, even if hardware fails...
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Sandro Gehri
commented
It would be very nice, if it would be possible to use Plesk in a redundant environment, like a master / slave configuration. Where the slave can take over if the master isn't available anymore.
Or even better a load balanced environment, where all Plesk servers have the same functionality (like master - master replication in MySQL) and an outage of a single server does not interrupt any services at all. -
Aneesh Joseph commented
Mirror two servers so that one can be used when primary server is down.
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Pedro Gonzalez
commented
+1
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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