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Synchronize Plesk Servers (Failover)

Keep two (or more) Plesk servers in sync for a failover scenario.
Migration Manager only allows manual "sync"

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Ralph Keck shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
already available  ·  AdminPlesk Staff (Community Manager, Plesk International GmbH) responded  · 

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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  • Jerry commented  ·   ·  Report

    Welcome in the year 2023!
    Maybe, just maybe, Plesk will arrive in this year also....

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    In our case not all customers hosted are mission critical. I do not see an escenario were an entire Plesk server full with hundreds of domains need to be replicated for failover. But I do see that some accounts need failover to a plesk failover special server. This can be configured per hosting account master/***** it will replicate the entire account and we can configure the failover in a load balancer, Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc.

  • Tobias commented  ·   ·  Report

    That is a feature I really need and I will change to another service if you don‘t publish it :(. I really love plesk but this is missing! I want to synchronize 1 server and have 1 „backup“ server.

  • Filip Filip commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is probably one single missing feature that drove more people away from Plesk than anything else (sad, but true).

  • Jean H commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi everybody,
    Originally submitted in 2013.
    Do we need another 10 years for evaluation ?
    I hope not.

    Thanks a lot for your «extra» support for this amazing platform.

    Very best.

  • unity100 commented  ·   ·  Report

    Cpanel is already working on high availability. Which seems to also include scalability. So Plesk will just be get left behind.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    Within that post, I comment before few years, and I give a voting.
    Actually - I am waiting over 5 Years (since 2016) for a failover feature within that post. I pay a lot of money for my Plesk licenses.
    All few years, you write a new comment to that post. That's all. So 2021 your focus already on other features.
    So Sorry - if we not hear a release date for failover functions within year 2022 for that failover feature, I have to leave Plesk and change all to other systems.

    So sorry, but 5 Years, are too much! Feature is wished in that forum since 2013.

  • Johan Skibdahl commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is extremely hard with shared hosting. Cannot see it work.
    For system critical Wordpress instances, I'll recommend looking at Virtuozzo platform for Wordpress.

  • Simon Dean commented  ·   ·  Report

    We have a few WordPress websites which are requiring 100% uptime.

    My vision for this would be to first get the Customer Account syncing between multi servers. I want the same credentials on different servers, even if different domains are hosted elsewhere. I want a true centralised DNS. I want ONE place to go and setup web hosting, but then choose which server to apply to.

    Then we can look at high availability. And that may be a case that in the central location, you can specify which servers should take part in the high availability aspect, and enable a domain, or a subscription as being high availability, then that information can be replicated between those servers.

    cPanel look like they're implementing high availability for a Q4 release, so it does seem like Plesk need to up their game.

  • Joshua commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yes could be some investment. But there are ways how to automate migrations although not the best way but we use automated crons to rsync and restart migrations so both servers are in sync. Maybe if you guys could use a similar concept it should work. Happy to help and contribute toward the project. You can just add a schedule tab to the migration interface.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    Implementing of data replication could be more than enough for a start.

  • Thomas Ehrhardt commented  ·   ·  Report

    revoked my voice for this. after getting more and more insight to cloud computing, I understand that this feature never will work with plesk.
    there's no chance to failover a plesk server with customer projects securely. each web app needs his own way for failover scenarios and how to handle this. to failover a plesk server with aprox. 100 customer domains, websites, databases, emails and much more will never work......

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