Cloning Panel in Virtual Environment

Why Do I Need Panel Cloning?

The popular and efficient way to start offering Panel services is to install Panel in a cloud and then seamlessly scale your infrastructure and install more Panel instances as your business grows. The challenge in this approach is that it is not possible just to copy the same Panel again and again to different virtual machines because of the following:

• Some clouds constantly change allocated IP addresses pools. If a Panel service was bound to an IP address which was later removed from the system, the service will not be operable.
• Each Panel object, for example, a customer account, should have a unique identifier, so-called GUID. This requirement is mandatory to avoid conflicts during migration from one server to another or during recovery from a backup. If you simply keep copying Panel, all the instances will share the same GUIDs.

The Panel cloning technology solves these and other scaling problems.

What Is Panel Cloning?

Panel cloning is the technology of copying the same Panel instance to different virtual machines without compromising Panel operability. Two prevailing usage scenarios of the cloning are:

• Fast Panel setup. If you wish to create virtual machines (GoDaddy cloud, Amazon cloud, KVM, Xen, and so on) with Panel on demand, the easiest way to streamline this process is to create an image of a virtual machine with specifically prepared Panel and then create new machines from this preset as many times as needed.
• Full backup. Cloning is a recovery solution too because almost all Panel data remain in cloned instances. Thus, you can first copy a prepared Panel to another virtual machine and then start the machine if your original machine becomes inoperable.

The application scope of Panel cloning is wider: For example, you can clone Panel and then safely test new features or configurations on it, but in this section, we will consider only the given scenarios because others are their extensions or combinations.

Cloning and Panel Licensing

Before you start cloning Panel, please contact our sales representatives and provide the range of IP addresses within which your Panel instances will be installed. Our licensing system will activate Panel servers from this range only.

Preparing a Panel Instance for Cloning

If you want to use Panel cloning, you should start with preparing your Panel instance. The following preparatory steps help you reset all environment- and initialization-specific settings (like the IP addresses pool) to prevent copying of unique information to other virtual machines. Omit steps 2 and 3 if your scenario is full backup.

1. (Fast setup, full backup) Instruct Panel to reconfigure its IP pool after restart. After running the following command, a Panel instance will discover actual IP addresses and reconfigure its IP pool each time you restart the corresponding virtual machine.

   # %plesk_cli%\ipmanage --auto-remap-ip-addresses true

   Note: This step is not mandatory if a virtual machine to which you want to copy Panel uses a static IP address. Moreover, omitting this option will make Panel start faster because Panel will not reconfigure its IP pool on each startup. However, we highly recommend to complete this step if you deploy Panel to a cloud.

2. (Fast setup only, optional) Initialize the instance programmatically or from the Panel GUI. Specify the administrator's information, locale, and other initialization settings using the init_conf command-line utility or the Panel GUI. Read more about the initialization in the Installing Panel > Post-Installation Setup section of the Installation, Upgrade, Migration, and Transfer Guide.
   
3. (Fast setup only) Prepare Panel for cloning by resetting some of its data (for example, the administrator's password, see the full list below) and remove the license key on the next start. Note that this utility does not perform cloning, it only modifies Panel settings.

   # %plesk_cli%\cloning --update -prepare-public-image true -reset-license true

When preparing a Panel instance for cloning, avoid restarting Plesk Management Service and shutting down the virtual machine on which the instance is installed.

How to Clone Panel

We assume that you have a virtual machine with Panel and you wish to clone this machine. The cloning procedure consists of three steps:

1. Prepare the Panel instance for cloning using the instructions we provided earlier.
2. If your software for managing virtual machines supports creating copies of virtual machines, which is normally true, stop (shut down) the virtual machine and create the image copy. Otherwise, if images copying is unavailable, you should use a special shutdown call that resets some instance data and then copy the machine by available means. The shutdown is performed by the following command from the command prompt (Cmd.exe):

   sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown

Once you have the virtual machine image, use it as a preset for new virtual machines or as a Panel snapshot.

What Data Are Reset by the cloning Utility?

The following list contains the items that are reset by the cloning utility:

• The IP pool
• Panel GUIDs
• Passwords for all IIS users (Anonymous and Application pool users for the Panel website and all sites created by Panel: Horde, Atmail, and all customer sites)
• The administrator's password
• (Optionally) The license key

The rest of the data, including the default SSL certificate, remain intact.

Leave your comments on this page