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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eightynn
commented
Would be great. Plesk could sell millions of extra license's ...
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Anonymous
commented
Redundancy should be included by now. It's almost 2020, seven years ago this idea was opted. It's time to act, Plesk. We cannot offer our clients single server solutions anymore. HA is the new default for my clients.
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Guest
commented
It's so disappointing, the load-balancer, auto-scaling, multi-server support with the latest Onyx or Obsidian is just not available. I raised tickets with the support, and the only option is to vote and hope they may implement these features.
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Maxim
commented
Redundancy and Load balancing is a must! if the Plesk VM goes down/or there is a big load - all websites goes down, so there should be a good way to take care of this.
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jabith
commented
To Webadmin:
Probably they won't care too much, because cPanel and Plesk are both owned by the same company: WebPros (funded by Oakley Capital), which also owns WHMCS. So they will rather avoid to steal each other's customers, instead of competing with each other as they used to do until 2018. In other words: the competition with cPanel has already ended over a year ago. :( -
Webadmin
commented
100000000% on board with this!! I dont think the plesk team understands that this will actually end the competition with CPanel, making Plesk the reigning winner of Highest Tier Failsafe and intuitive Web hosting control panels.NO OTHER control panel will be able to compete in the same space of web hosting.
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Anonymous
commented
A reaction from staff on the nr1 suggestion would be polite.
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Jadira Norton
commented
Thank you 👠🎓🎒👑🔰
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Anonymous
commented
Seria muy útil
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Sam Thacker
commented
This really is something we need. Right now I have client sites hosted only on one server with Plesk... if that goes down or needs maintenance done, my client sites go down. Especially since you killed Plesk Multi-Server's functionality to do this, please seriously consider integrating something like this into the new software.
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Thaer
commented
it's one of the most important feature must be in plesk taking in consideration not only sharing the website but all the resources of the servers
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Anonymous
commented
I would like to add a vote for Plesk sync for failover scenario please.
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Anonymous
commented
this feature is needed a must feature
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Keith Bohler
commented
This would be an amazing feature, that if done correctly, could put Plesk to be a better competitor to other panels available. If you guys did an easy to configure, maintain, and reliable solution for failover, this would put Plesk at the top.
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Anonymous
commented
What do you still waiting for? Plesk??? It is Q3 2019 we are about to move in mars, come on mate...
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Anonymous
commented
yes i agree, i can cluster tomcats behind plesk sites but i cannot have plesk use a strategy to simply cluster apaches
i think with AWS and their great pricing and auto scaling by creating more containers, it would REALLY BE EXCELLENT if us plesk admins could tell our clients that the apache/nginx are also clustered and less prone to issues.
people can use remote db servers or aurora or whatever for db clustering needs but apache and nginx are still single point of failures
progress on a simple way to use plesk to cluster apaches/nginxs would really rock!
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SW
commented
They could've easily accomplished this before they killed off Plesk Multi-Server which had node synchronization for some plesk components. And it would have benefited Plesk as they bill for the management node. We use to utilize it paying double than what we currently do but terminated it due to plesk stopped developing it. So it's plesk lost as it seems they have no plans to invest in this capability.
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Anonymous
commented
depending on the licensing it could actually be good for business if you have to pay more or an additional license to have a second server. For us its the main thing holding us back from using it for really critical sites and applications.
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Lau
commented
I suspect they are concerned because of the scope of implementing such feature. But this is in 3rd place for user suggestions, so this should be implemented ASAP.
Start off with just synchronizing the settings (or parts of them) for selected subscriptions. Synchronizing files and databases can be added later. If all that is done, doing the work for HA might become possible.
@63352059-plesk-staff Does anybody of the staff like to comment? -
Anonymous
commented
It is for sure that Plesk has some business concern behind "not making HA possible in Plesk". Anyway there are already two panels that have such function, i personally don't like them and yes it would be cool to see that function in Plesk. Maybe massive tickets to ask Plesk support about implementing such function ?.