Mirroring a Plesk server (as a warm/spare)

[Nathalie_Vaiser]

Is the "Migration Manager" in Plesk something that can be run periodically to keep a 2nd server updated as a mirror of the original server?

Or is this mean to be used as a one-time thing?


Otherwise, what is recommended to mirror MySQL databases (except the PSA as that overwrites the settings on the second server) and files? I was thinking MySQL Master/Slave Replication for the database and rsync for the site files.

But using the 'Migration Manager' already built into Plesk would make more sense. Is this something that can be run as a cronjob?


(as a side note, the 2nd server is running on a different IP address and its own Plesk license)

 

[sebgonzes]

Welll... I think there is better solution, you can review an solution with drbd to have 2 server with same data....

 

[Nathalie_Vaiser]

But that is a block backup which means it would replicate the entire server (and so everything including the IP address settings would he replicated)

This would cause an IP conflict since both machines are hosted on the same network.

 

[sebgonzes]

Well, in our case we work with virtual server, so If one host down, we can rescue and reboot server on the other host without problem... I don't know if it's the better way for you.

 

[Nathalie_Vaiser]

The concept might work except this is hosted at a hosting provider, so it could be an issuing having the VM powered off most of the time (someone may turn it back on accidentally), and the other issue is how to update it if it's off? It mean the machine would have to be powered on at some points (daily for example) to have the latest changes from the original server.

The original server is being backed up and can be restored as a bare-metal-restore but the restore process can take many hours and in this case the client is looking to set up a backup server that can be used in a short about of time should the primary server fail.

 

[sebgonzes]

Well, depend about your case of course... but in our case, all server are always online and with an speed links to sincronize data.

 

[jola]

We are running plesk on a KVM based virtual server. The kvm based server is on an lvm partition that we can create a snapshot of and backup while the server continues to run. This makes it possible to keep a full backup of the entire virtual server on a different physical machine. We also have a failover subnet that our host allows us to switch instantly between physical servers. We have tried to move a live virtual server, running websites, between physical machines and it only takes 30s down-time to read-over the last changes after the snapshot was made, move over the subnet, and restart the server on a new hardware node. Both the hardware server and the virtual server are running Cent OS 7.1. This KVM virtualization has worked very well for us so far. We used to run Virtuozzo (also from Odin), but KVM virtualization is really nice.