Migrating to a new cluster to upgrade to v12?

madebyraygun

I have an Enhance cluster with 1 control panel and 6 connected VPSes. The CP and 3 of the VPSes are still running Ubuntu 22. I understand the proper way to upgrade Enhance in place would be to upgrade all VPS to Ubuntu 24 before proceeding.

Thinking about the amount of work required to upgrade each of the VPSes to Ubuntu 24 and the potential for downtime and problems during that process, I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just provision a new CP server, install a fresh license of Enhance 12, and then gradually provision one new server at a time. Each server has only a handful of sites (all managed by me) so I can move them over as needed rather than all at once.

Am I overthinking things? I have snapshots for every VPS, should I just YOLO the Ubuntu upgrade and see how it goes?

(And when I say YOLO, I mean proceed very carefully, LOL)

cPFence

madebyraygun

We recommend going with the upgrade path, it’s pretty straightforward. This guide might help:
https://cpfence.app/how-to-upgrade-from-ubuntu-22-04-to-24-04-a-step-by-step-guide/

madebyraygun

cPFence Thanks for the guide, I was able to follow it closely and successfully upgrade 3 servers tonight. Time for bed! I'll finish up tomorrow and attempt the Enhance V12 upgrade over the weekend.

Kosta

I personally preferred the fresh cluster method.

When I was doing upgrade 22-24 Ubuntu it was quick without problems.

twest

I'm still on Ubuntu 22, and upgraded to V12 fine and dandy (well, 1 cluster went perfect and 1 cluster went to total shit - but it wasn't related to being in Ubuntu 22 in any way).

People forget what LTS means, it means we don't HAVE to switch to the next OS version just because it's available, there's still plenty of life left in 22 and it's not a huge difference jumping to 24.

Personally if I was you, I'd upgrade to 24 just because its so dead simple on VPS. Your reboot times will be tiny.

We're deployed on bare metal, reboots take 10 minutes, so OS upgrade is unattractive at this time due to downtime from reboots. Perhaps next year.

madebyraygun

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'm going to attempt to upgrade a low-stakes VPS (full backup, only two sites) to Ubuntu 24 tonight.

@twest The only reason I'm considering the upgrade to Ubuntu 24 is because it's listed as a requirement for Enhance v12: https://enhance.com/docs/getting-started/installation-guide.html#hardware-requirements

Otherwise I would probably hang on for another year or two and then just migrate the accounts over to a new VPS in the cluster.

twest

madebyraygun yeah that's what you'd want to do for new clusters for sure, but 22 is still supported. It would be a supremely dumb mistake if they stopped supporting 22 when there's still 2 years of support left on it, while they're simultaneously adding support for PHP versions +7 years expired.

Utilizing LTS OSs is a standard practice in the hosting industry since time ememorial, specifically so hosts don't have to go through such major updates very often.

I'd reckon if Enhance became incompatible with 22 before 2027 then the panel would be an abject failure and only suitable for hobbyists and tinkerers... So I'm confident that's not gonna be an issue. They'd have too much to lose reputationally for that kind of mistake.

That being said, I'd have already run it if the v12 update didn't shit the bed on me on one cluster. Don't have any room left for outages this year, gotta just play it safe.

msanders5

madebyraygun Same was able to upgrade my 22 control server with no problem today

btraill

The upgrade process might seem like the 'scarier' option -- but it works quite well. I'd personally just recommend upgrading your existing infra.