Ev1 Upgrade path to Enterprise RedHat

[gunmuse]

Cpanel's Ev1 partnership is a rocky one with me. I get very tired of the Shrugged shoulder approach from the people who take my money and tell me to come and ask you.

I pay highly for my machines and I pay a premium to use Cpanel so support shouldn't be something I have to hunt for or use forums for.


Ev1's solution to add a hard drive to my RAID 5 server for an upgrade path concerns me.

Seems that for the Cpanel premium I pay each month that a solution to copy my server to the new system automatically should be put into place as to not disrupt my DNS,Email,Websites, or WHM Autopilot for my hosting solution.

This was business class software and all Three are given no answers even while I am certain they are working on a solution. I want to use Cpanel, Whmautopilot and Redhat enterprise. I want my Raid 5 to act like a Raid 5 system and I am hoping that Enterprise will accomplish this better than 7.3 did.

A step by step on how to do this upgrade needs to be written or automation software needs to be implemented for the "Extra drive solution"

A way to test the sites before we dump the old ones.

Complicated yes, necessary yes. I can't screw with 85 corporate clients business's. I am not hosting mom and pop $3 a month sites. I can't say oh well sorry you need to reinstall you business if something goes wrong.

I want clear written instructions or software to accomplish this task within the outlined upgrade from EV1 I think for $400 a month per server that is not asking a lot.

The reason I posted this here is EV1 pushed me off on to you for support.

Sorry for the vent but my business is in flux until this is settled. I am scared to add more clients to my system for fear of amplifing my problems.

 

[haze]

OMG.. Ok, first, its not cpanels responsibility to migrate your clients. You should have known this much before stepping into the industry. Second, you get no hand holding at EV1, HIRE A COMPETANT SYSTEM ADMIN! If you want cpanel to do the move then 1. Purchase new server ( preferably somewhere FULLY managed ) 2. Migrate clients using cPanels nifty "Transfer Account" feature.

What more is it that you want? You got a Non managed solution from a Non managed provider that also sold you cpanel for what? 10 bucks a month? You know most of us pay 40 - 70 bucks a month? Do you see us whinging?

Look, im not trying to flame or put you down.. your post just steamed me up.. and i've seen this often.. much to often from EV1.

See, before you even started using 7.3 you should have been working on a migration plan.. We've known about them dropping the distro for more than a year now.. there are no excuses. You should have tested your raid 5 setup before putting clients on it. You need to think ahead!

 

[kris1351]

Going to have to agree with imin here. Your server from EV1 is anything but pricey and premium. They provide a basic server with CPanel as a $10-20/month add on. They aren't giving you Dell or high quality hardware either.

Now for migrating to RHE there are several options here and CPanel has been more than fair with their offerings. You can stay on 7.2/7.3/8.0/9.0 for as long as FedoraLegacy keeps producing updates. Many hosters prefer the 7.3 OS because it was very fast and stable. Others have moved up to grab added features and more current support. Now in addition to those OS offerings CPanel has made a push to support Fedora which you can update from any previous version of RH to without having to reload the OS. It is a bit aggressive upgrade wise, but it is an option if you do not want to move to RHE.

We have several RHE boxes and several 7-9 boxes and at this point I do not see the advantage of rushing to upgrade all of the servers. From an admins point of view RH is RH no matter what the version. There are slight changes from release to release, but there is no added work. RHE is a bit bulky at this point still and there are still bugs being sorted out between CPanel and RHE so unless you are willing to run Edge releases at times this might not be a good option for you.

My final point is that EV1 even is offering BSD installs for a small charge if you do not want to move to RHE. It is supported by CPanel also. So you have LOTS of options and this was not a surprise in what was changing. It was announced months ago and we have all had time to start preparing. Whether you are jumping and upgrading all servers at once or waiting for bugs to smooth out we have all had time. Sorry for the long post, but jumping on EV1 (an unmanaged server company) and CPanel who sells the licenses to EV1 is not the right path here. There are lots of capable admins on the boards that would be willing to help you minimize your downtime if you are willing to pay. Otherwise research it thoroughly and do the upgrade yourself.

 

[rpmws]

Originally posted by kris1351
Going to have to agree with imin here. Your server from EV1 is anything but pricey and premium. They provide a basic server with CPanel as a $10-20/month add on. They aren't giving you Dell or high quality hardware either.

Now for migrating to RHE there are several options here and CPanel has been more than fair with their offerings. You can stay on 7.2/7.3/8.0/9.0 for as long as FedoraLegacy keeps producing updates. Many hosters prefer the 7.3 OS because it was very fast and stable. Others have moved up to grab added features and more current support. Now in addition to those OS offerings CPanel has made a push to support Fedora which you can update from any previous version of RH to without having to reload the OS. It is a bit aggressive upgrade wise, but it is an option if you do not want to move to RHE.

We have several RHE boxes and several 7-9 boxes and at this point I do not see the advantage of rushing to upgrade all of the servers. From an admins point of view RH is RH no matter what the version. There are slight changes from release to release, but there is no added work. RHE is a bit bulky at this point still and there are still bugs being sorted out between CPanel and RHE so unless you are willing to run Edge releases at times this might not be a good option for you.

My final point is that EV1 even is offering BSD installs for a small charge if you do not want to move to RHE. It is supported by CPanel also. So you have LOTS of options and this was not a surprise in what was changing. It was announced months ago and we have all had time to start preparing. Whether you are jumping and upgrading all servers at once or waiting for bugs to smooth out we have all had time. Sorry for the long post, but jumping on EV1 (an unmanaged server company) and CPanel who sells the licenses to EV1 is not the right path here. There are lots of capable admins on the boards that would be willing to help you minimize your downtime if you are willing to pay. Otherwise research it thoroughly and do the upgrade yourself.

I agree with the second 2 posters also. However you do get Dell hardware in some cases at EV1 I know becuase I have 6 boxes there for the past 10 months.

As far a migrating, moving ..humm. I have been moving 200 -300 sites around from server to brand new server for years. cPanel makes it easier than any I have seen and EV1 makes it easy. As for high profile clients ..well most of mine are not. They pay $10-$20 per month. But that shouldn't matter when you have 0, zero , downtime everytime you make a move. I have yet to have downtime due to a move so if they were $500 per month clients they would be fine anyway.

The easiest way to do it is to order a new box at EV1, move your stuff with cPanel and point dns with old dns server to new ips on new box. Eventually change dns at the nic. Tell EV1 to remove the old box after a few days. I have done this on 3 machines so far. Easy and cost me nothing when you time it right.

I also wouldn't call $10/month for cPanel a premium nor would I call $400 a month a premium for what you could pay $2000 for elsewhere with or without support for what you want to do.

 

[gunmuse]

Ok since none of you know what your talking about. I asked for a ENTERPRISE migration. Which no one even knew there wasn't one. Including me.

Second we Run Dell Raid 5's there were no EXTRA ones to buy for a server to server move. As the high end hardware at ev1 is VERY limited and they don't add on to it.

Third a competitent admin would know that corporate clients don't play by rules. Cpanel was not capable of moving my clients glitche free. Sites with SSL certs didn't have their certs moved. and Cpanel doesn't copy modified sub files like Rc. local and my.cnf and all of that. It takes a few days to set those things up.

Also we do live broadcast streaming up to satellites down time was not an option and just the ip change was a nightmare.

So thank you for your long winded sessions of telling me what you don't know. If I wanted a solution to move $3 hosting clients I wouldn't of needed any advice.

Finally what you pay for equipment and and the software on it is not my problem nor is it even relavent to helping anyone. Sorry you pay so much for cpanel. I still expect the same service as you just the same.

 

[SarcNBit]

Originally posted by gunmuse
So thank you for your long winded sessions of telling me what you don't know.

Here let me make it short and sweet and tell you what you don't know. You are not cPanel's customer, ev1 is. ev1 offers unmanged server solutions.

Catch-22 I would say. I would expect an "enterprise class" host to do their homework BEFORE getting in the middle of such a situation. ev1 makes it very clear that they do not provide support beyond hardware failure.

These forums (or any forums for that matter) are not official sources of support for either ev1 or cpanel. These forums are provided so that cpanel admins can assist other cpanel admins. It works well for what you pay for it.

 

[kris1351]

Since you are the one that obviously is confused and has no clue what they are doing, go to RedHat's site and look at the migration. THERE IS NO UPGRADE PATH TO RHE FROM PREVIOUS VERSIONS. That is plastered on their site, these forums, all over EV1s forums and EV1s techs are the ones that told you from the get go. This is why they told you they would have to reload the os completely.

It is not Cpanel's issue for you to have to upgrade and EV1 made more than generous offerings with the upgrade paths. Most people did it logically by adding a spare blank drive then replacing the other. Since you were running Raid 5 it would require a little more planning and setup, but still you aren't Cpanels customer and it has nothing to do with Redhat EOLing older versions. If you really want to complain you could yell at RHE for going to a commercial version.

 

[kris1351]

I will comment on your slights at the users here. We upgraded ALL of our servers to RHE without issues. Wasn't that difficult and it doesn't matter if you own one server or 100, there was no difference in how it had to be done.

 

[rpmws]

Originally posted by kris1351
I will comment on your slights at the users here. We upgraded ALL of our servers to RHE without issues. Wasn't that difficult and it doesn't matter if you own one server or 100, there was no difference in how it had to be done.

I managed to get 6 full boxes done in 4 hours just moved to new machines.

 

[kris1351]

Yea, it's amazing what you can do when you know what you are doing and are willing to learn instead of expecting people to do it for you. Seems we are getting more and more posts here with OMG and WTF Cpanel sucks for expecting me to know what I am doing.

Love helping people out, but some posts are a little too much.

 

[eth00]

As others have said Ev1 is totaly unmanaged and you cannot expect much from them. I personally use ev1 for some of my servers, but not all. They are a good hosting company but if I was hosting high profile clients I would avoid them...too often has a server gotten formated accidently or shut down for abuse that did not happen.

 

[portman]

RHEL Migration

gunmuse your right...there is not migration path...and RH was clear from the begining there would be none.

There are all sorts of technological restrctions that cannot be overcome. No matter how inflexible a client may want to be they often must bend to reality. Even Fortune 100's. I see it every day.

As Technologists in IT it is our responsibility to inform and direct to the best solution. Then again money can solve many problems. Not all of them though.

If you know what you are doing you can switch IPs with almost no interuption.

 

[procam]

gunmuse

gunmuse
Man if u have such HIGH end customers and you are saving soooo much money being over at EV1 why dont you just pay a skilled admin to do the work for you - and stop complaining- It takes all of a couple clicks to move an ssl cert and big fing deal if u have to copy a couple of lines of code to your apache conf - cpanel does the rest ~ dont be so freakin lazy mr money bags!!
Some of us work for a living!!!

 

[rpmws]

Re: gunmuse

Originally posted by procam
gunmuse
Man if u have such HIGH end customers and you are saving soooo much money being over at EV1 why dont you just pay a skilled admin to do the work for you - and stop complaining- It takes all of a couple clicks to move an ssl cert and big fing deal if u have to copy a couple of lines of code to your apache conf - cpanel does the rest ~ dont be so freakin lazy mr money bags!!
Some of us work for a living!!!

yep ..been up for 31 hours, just finished moving 3 big ecom sites to dedicated servers ..had to move that damn cert ..yep sure did!!! took almost 2 minutes!!!

 

[gorilla]

Yeah , burned my fingers with ev1 as well , definatly no support !
So i guess had to count my loses and move on to a better managed solutin.
Found fastserver.net which is a little pricier but managed and fantastic support ( usually get a respondse within minutes) ! :D
So i guess the lesson i lerned is , if i wanna be serious about my business I cant just use the cheapest server option ( and thats what ev1 is )
Anyway before you decide on your new server go and have a look at fastserver , been with them for 6 months now and am very happy with their support and service

 

[eurorocco]

If you appreciate your business, then get someone who knows.

I had servers at EV1, and let me tell you... they had a good network, but it was a self-managed thing. If the minimomuse has 85+ corporate clients talking to satelites and the pentagon he shouldn't be using EV1.

EV1 is cheap, entry-level for people who can manage. Go there if you don't mind them dumping half-cooked servers on you hoping you will one day climb the learning curve and get on with the business part of the process.

I had to switch to another provider who now takes care of things through his techs... I do some fine-tuning, but they do the bulk of the work... and not much pricier.

You need to find the vendor who will provide you Red Hat Enterprise with Raid 5 out of the box. Do not try to show EV1 or Cpanel how to reinvent the wheel. They got their purpose and scope, and you need to work making the most out of what they offer. Do not get a provider expecting they will toil for your buck. It's all a fast business and the only one who cares about your business and your customers is you.



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