Tips/Experiences Migrating WHM+Accounts to Almalinux 9? Checklist Anyone?

[jazee]

So I'm going to take advantage of one of these Black Friday Deals to spin up a new VPS on Alamalinux 9, install Cpanel, then migrate some, not all of my accounts to the new server. I know for one, I'll need to install and copy the config files over for Configserver Firewall, and it's been so many years I've done various tweaks that there's no way I can remember everything (like edting the MySQL caching config, etc etc)

First thing I'm wondering is if Almalinux 9 poses any additional possible issues than Almalinux 8. This is such a pain in the ass it's something I only want to do every 3-5 years so I figure get the newest O/S version WHM supports but of course the newer one will have less testing history and user experience.

It appears the Transfer Tool these days has the ability to transfer quite a lot of the WHM configuration. Does anyone have a checklist or want to help start one here of other things to consider that may need to be copied over that the Transfer Tool doesn't. For example I'm not sure the Transfer Tool copied over the root cron job config. I also am guessing it won't transfer my MySQL tweaks? DNS updates are of course on the list. All my DNS records are on a 3rd party DNS host though so the Cpanel DNS records are irrelevant in my case.

Also, I'm still on MySQL 5.7 - dumb me, I thought WHM would automatically upgrade MySQL all this time, but I assume going to 8 and transferring accounts is pretty painless?

Thanks in advance for any info.

 

[SimpleSonic]

AlmaLinux 9 is really new as far as cPanel support and if you decide you want to convert to CloudLinux 9, cPanel will need to be version 116.0.1 or higher (Edge Tier).

Additionally, make sure to check that any/all plugins you are using with cPanel also work on AlmaLinux 9 as well.

For the Transfer Tool's Live Transfer option -in my personal opinion- I would disable that as in my experience it caused more issues than it helped and complicates things if an account transfer fails and needs to be re-transferred.

As for MySQL, I would use MariaDB instead of MySQL as it scales much better and has lower resources usage.

 

[cPRex]

I will say, 116 will likely make it to Release within a week or two, so you wouldn't have to use Current for that long if you wanted to start an A9 box.

 

[jazee]

Cpanel themselves recommends 114 (but that's because it's not edge obviously) I would definitely go 116 as that's a good strategy with stable coming out soon. I won't have any mission-critical business apps running on this particular server. Thanks for the suggestion.

Regarding Maria vs MySQL, I happened to do a couple hours of reading reviews and tests last week. The overall conclusion is both have their pros and cons but there's no huge advantage of one over the other for relatively small-sized application environments. Maria actually previously went through some significant performance issues during 10.5. The application with the most usage has only about 15 simultaneous users with the PHP script execution time including the most complicated DB queries is 1.5 seconds max. I assume if you wanted to move from MySQL to Maria, you'd have to transfer the accounts first then convert the server to Maria?

Not to get off on a tangent but I heard Maria uses more memory. Any idea how much more?

 

[cPRex]

I haven't run into any major memory differences between the two.

 

[SimpleSonic]

Cpanel themselves recommends 114 (but that's because it's not edge obviously) I would definitely go 116 as that's a good strategy with stable coming out soon. I won't have any mission-critical business apps running on this particular server. Thanks for the suggestion.

Regarding Maria vs MySQL, I happened to do a couple hours of reading reviews and tests last week. The overall conclusion is both have their pros and cons but there's no huge advantage of one over the other for relatively small-sized application environments. Maria actually previously went through some significant performance issues during 10.5. The application with the most usage has only about 15 simultaneous users with the PHP script execution time including the most complicated DB queries is 1.5 seconds max. I assume if you wanted to move from MySQL to Maria, you'd have to transfer the accounts first then convert the server to Maria?

Not to get off on a tangent but I heard Maria uses more memory. Any idea how much more?

In terms of CPU usage, in a shared hosting environment the difference between MySQL 8 and MariaDB 10.6 under a decent load is significant. MariaDB uses about half the CPU running the exact same amount of accounts, apps, etc., in my experience. The memory usage was about the same, sometimes slightly higher with MariaDB, but the savings in CPU resource usage easily outweighed the slight additional memory usage in my opinion.

There is no easy way to change from MySQL 8 to MariaDB 10.6, so that is something you have to decide prior to installing cPanel.