MediaTemple rolls out (dv) 3.5 for new customers…old ones have to migrate themselves (UPDATED)

MediaTemple announced today that they were rolling out their new (dv) servers. (dv)’s are similar to the Joyent Accelerators, which are basically virtual dedicated servers (more info on the FAQ). The (dv) are built on Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 and Plesk 8.3 which were released in December. All new customers get these starting today,and old customers can upgrade following these steps (basically using Plesk Migration assistant).

What I really don’t understand is why they don’t migrate it automatically since it is technically a virtual machine. A top selling point for virtual machines is their portability and fast deployment. Here is an excerpt from the Virtuozzo page:

Transporter allows reliable, easy migration from a physical or other VMM server to a Parallels Virtuozzo Container.

I probably going to upgrade my other site which is hosted on a (dv) during the weekend. I’ll post some comments on how it went down(hopefully not the site…lol).

UPDATE: some of the details regarding the new (dv) expressed in the article were inaccurate. I got a response from Arman, the MediaTemple forum admin regarding some of the questions posed in the post(very fast response). I will post the detailed explanation once I get cleared. Sorry about the inconvenience.

UPDATE 2: Here are the missing details for the (dv) 3.5 as expressed by Arman from (mt), and others in the forum:

Does it run Virtuozzo 4.0?

No. That will make it to our next iteration of the (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server product line, though.

It actually runs PHP5.2, MySQL 5.0, Perl 5.8.8, Python 2.4.3, Ruby 1.8.6, Cent OS 5 managed by Plesk 8.3

Why can’t the “Transporter” feature from Virtuozzo complete the automatic migration?

This is referring to a feature that allows you to move the “Container” (used to be called a “VE” or Virtual Environment) from one host server to another. The host server does not directly control the software running inside of a container, so this isn’t necessarily pertaining to being able to update the software on an existing server, but rather being able to have that Container “exist” on a different physical server. This would apply to things like replicating a (dv) configuration for load balancing or upgrading to a (dpv) Nitro.

Some useful links:

Migration using Migration Manager
Reverting PHP 5 in (dv) 3.0
Ruby on Rails installation.

BTW, I didn’t upgrade during the weekend. Hope to do it soon.

(Via (mt) weblog.)

Comments 1

  1. Bryce wrote:

    Hi Jonathan,

    Just checking in to see if you ever did the switch over to 3.5 and how it all went. I was just wondering if you had to do anything special with Wordpress to run on PHP 5 and MySQL 5. I run some Wordpress sites as well and just wanted to see if any changes had to be made to Wordpress itself to make it run on the new 3.5 servers.

    Posted 29 Feb 2008 at 12:54 am

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