Table of Contents
This chapter provides you information on how to migrate from competitive control panels to Plesk control panel.
Plesk Migration Manager is created for easy and fast migration from other, competitive control panels to Plesk, and also for migration from older releases of Plesk and from different platforms of Plesk. At the present moment you can migrate the following platforms to Plesk:
To access Migration Manager, select the Server shortcut in the navigation pane, and click the Migration Manager icon.
First, you need to upload the migration agent to the remote host you wish to migrate to Plesk. To do this, leave the Remote migration mode option selected and specify the remote control panel parameters:
specify the source host. You can use either the IP address or the domain name of the server you wish to migrate.
enter the login name and password used for logging in to the remote host you are migrating. You can either use the 'root' login, or use an account with sudo enabled, provided that this account is allowed to run any commands through sudo.
make sure that the remote hosting platform is up and running, and the 'iconv' utility is installed in the remote host's operating system. Plesk migration manager will try to detect the remote hosting platform automatically and use the proper migration agent.
The agent will upload to the specified remote host and acquire its status. You will proceed to the progress page where you can view the migration progress and stop it if desired.
At this step, the migration agent is uploaded to the remote host and you are prompted to select the migration preferences:
If the PMM detected the hosting platform incorrectly, select it in the respective drop-down box.
If you want to apply a domain template to migrated domains, specify the hard drive partitions or data compression options to be used during migration, proceed to the Advanced tab. Note that if Migration manager runs out of disk space on the remote host during migration, the data on the remote host can be permanently corrupted. To avoid this, you are recommended to use a partition with the reasonable amount of free disk space.
To migrate specific objects from the remote host to Plesk, leave the Select objects that you wish to migrate from host option selected and click Next >>.
To migrate all data from the remote host to Plesk, select the Dump all option and click Next >>.
After you choose to migrate all data, you will proceed to the Downloading remote host content page, where you can view and stop the downloading if desired.
Once the downloading is complete, you will be taken to the IP Mapping page.
The IP Mapping page displays all IP addresses of the host you are migrating to Plesk and all IP addresses of Plesk you are migrating this host to.
On this page,
When the remote host objects are migrated, you will proceed to the Migration Result page where you can view the migration result. This can be either the message on the successful migration or error messages, if any errors occurred during the migration process, and the list of objects that could not be migrated due to the errors occurred.
Click Finish to finish the migration.
After you choose the selective migration, you will proceed to the Migration Progress page, where you can view migration progress and stop the migration if desired.
After that you will be taken to the Select objects for migration page. On this page, select which objects you wish to be migrated to Plesk:
After you chose accounts for migration, you will proceed to the Downloading remote host content page, where you can view and stop the downloading if desired.
Once the downloading is complete, you will be taken to the IP Mapping page.
After you chose domains for migration, you will be taken to the Select client account for domains migration page.
On this page,
If you decided to continue migration, you will be taken to the IP Mapping page.
The IP Mapping page displays all IP addresses of the host you are migrating to Plesk and all IP addresses of Plesk you are migrating this host to.
On this page,
When the remote host objects are migrated, you will proceed to the Migration Result page where you can view the migration result. This can be either the message on the succsessful migration or error messages, if any errors occurred during the migration process, and the list of objects that could not be migrated due to the errors occurred.
Click Finish to finish the migration.
You can stop migration by clicking Cancel on the Migration Progress, Downloading remote host content or IP Mapping pages. This will take you to the Stop migration process page.
Select the Remove temporary files checkbox to remove any temporary files created during migration, and click OK.
If you wish to migrate to Plesk 7.5 from another hosting platform or earlier versions of Plesk, and cannot afford additional hardware for this operation, you can do it in one of the following ways:
Migration with use of chrooted environment.
Plesk cannot be installed on the machine running other control panel software. To circumvent this limitation, you need to create a kind of virtual environment, such as chroot. Plesk can be installed into chrooted environment in a special mode. Once Plesk is installed into the chrooted environment, you can migrate data from your hosting platform into the chrooted environment. After successful completion, you will be able to shut your previously used hosting platform down and use Plesk as your main control panel.
Use of data import feature of Migration Manager.
You should have a hard disk with operating system and Plesk software installed. This feature allows importing to Plesk the data gathered by migration agent. Once the data are obtained, you will have to move them to the disk with Plesk installation and reboot to the operating system where Plesk is installed. After successful completion, you will be able to remove your previously used hosting platform.
You are advised to create a chrooted environment on a separate partition. This is required for you to be able to use this partition as a root file system upon completion of installing Plesk and migrating data to it. You must have super user permissions in order to configure the chrooted environment.
In order to create a chrooted environment, you will need at least 2 gigabytes of disk space for the operating system and Plesk installation, plus some amount of disk space for user data.
You can set up your system into a chrooted environment using the utility from the chroot_tool.zip package, which is available at ftp://download1.sw-soft.com/Plesk/Plesk7.5/Extensions, or use other third-party utilities such as, for instance, mach (http://mach.sourceforge.net).
We strongly recommend that you backup all the data on your hard drive prior to setting up chrooted environment.
Prior to installing Plesk, make sure that port 8443 is not used. If some program uses this port, you should reconfigure it so as to free the port.
Copy the Plesk installer file to the chrooted directory
Enter the chrooted environment using the command chroot <directory_name>
Define the value for variable CHROOTISH=yes
export CHROOTISH=yes
Configure mysql as follows:
mysql_install_db
chown -R mysql /var/lib/mysql/
Run mysql without networking. This can be done differently for different versions of MySQL. For instance, for MySQL version 3 this is done with the command “safe_mysqld --skip-network &”, and for version 4 - “mysqld_safe --skip-networking &”.
Run Plesk installer and follow the instructions presented on the screen.
Once Plesk installation is completed, log in to control panel, click the Server shortcut, and then click the Migration Manager button.
Specify your host as the data source, and proceed with migration as usual.
Once the migration is completed, you need to reboot server to start it from chroot partition.
Remove the "NO_RESTART_DAEMON" parameter from /etc/psa/psa.conf file.
Make sure that everything works correctly. In case of errors you can reboot to your previously used partition with other control panel.
To boot to the chrooted environment, follow these steps:
Add to the boot manager an item for booting up from the partition with chrooted environment.
Example:
Let’s suppose you have Fedora Core 2 operating system and GRUB boot manager installed.
Change to the ./boot/grub/ directory.
Check out where your chrooted environment is set up using the command fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 2097 MB, 2097152000 bytes 128 heads, 32 sectors/track, 1000 cylinders Units = cylinders of 4096 * 512 = 2097152 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 50 102384 83 Linux /dev/sda2 51 919 1779712 83 Linux /dev/sda3 920 1000 165888 82 Linux swap Disk /dev/sdb: 2418 MB, 2418016256 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 293 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 293 2353491 83 Linux
In our case it is the partition /dev/sdb1
Open file grub.conf or menu.list in a text editor, and add the following records:
title Fedora Core-chroot (2.6.5-1.358)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=/dev/sdb1
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
Save changes.
Create an initial ramdisk in the chrooted environment.
Example for Fedora Core 2
Let’s suppose you have chrooted environment set up in the directory /disk2
Enter the chroot using the command chroot /disk2
Remove the current image of initail ramdisk
ls /boot/
System.map-2.6.5-1.358 initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img config-2.6.5-1.358 vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
rm -f /boot/initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
Create new image of initail ramdisk:
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img 2.6.5-1.358
Example for SuSe 9.1
Let’s suppose you have chrooted environment set up in the directory /disk2
Enter the chroot using the command chroot /disk2
Remove the current image of initail ramdisk using the command mkinitrd
Restart your system.
If you have a hard disk with operating system and Plesk software installed, you can use the Import configuration feature of Plesk Migration Manager.
Mount the disk where your Plesk is installed.
Choose the migration agent suitable for your source hosting platform. Migration agents are stored in the directory /usr/local/psa/PMM on your Plesk drive:
Change to the directory /usr/local/psa/PMM/var on your Plesk drive, copy the agent from /usr/local/psa/PMM to the current directory. Then start the migration agent with –get-status option: ./<your platform name>.pl --get-status
If agent suits your platform, you will be able to do a full dump of your configuration using the option –dump-all, or make a selective dump of selected entities using the option –dump-domains for dumping domains, or –dump-accounts for dumping user accounts (you can run the migration agent with –h option for details). For example: <agent_file_name> --dump-domains=domain1, domain2, domain3…
Once agent has finished its job, move the contents of the directory /usr/local/psa/PMM/var/pma to the directory /usr/local/psa/PMM/archives and copy the file /usr/local/psa/PMM/var/<your platform name>.xml to /usr/local/psa/PMM/var/dump.xml
Reboot to the operating system where Plesk is installed.
After successful boot up, login to the Control Panel, select the Server shortcut and click the Migration Manager button.
Select the Import configuration mode option, and follow the instructions presented on the screen.