While there is not yet an exact ETA, we are pleased to announce that InterWorx 8 (IW8) will be moving from Public Beta to Public Release, soon.
Customers who would like to opt in early to IW8 have two options:
Install IW8 on a fresh EL8 or EL9 server. Installation instructions can be found here (Information on EL9 support can be found in our original announcement)
Use the in-place IW7 to IW8 upgrade tool. Information on how to enable the upgrade tool, and upgrade to InterWorx 8 can be found here
As InterWorx 8 and the in-place upgrade tool are still considered public beta at this time, use on production servers at this time should be considered at-own-risk
When using the in-place upgrade tool, it is currently recommended to select Beta from the dropdown when selecting the upgrade channel, as that is considered the most up-to-date version of IW8. If selecting any other channel, just be aware that the Welcome page that shows after the upgrade will still have the information for IW7, as this page has only been updated in the version of IW8 that is currently in the Beta channel (8.0.21)
Once IW8 reaches Public Release status, the in-place upgrade tool will be exposed by default, and will no longer be enabled
The upgrade from IW7 to IW8 is, and will continue to be, an opt-in feature. Automated updates to IW8 will not occur until IW7 reaches EOL status. At this time, we do not have a date as to when IW7 will be considered EOL, but it will not be any time soon. Just as we did with IW6 and IW7, we will support both versions concurrently for some time. New features, however, will be developed for IW8
InterWorx 8 includes the following new features:
Refreshed GUI
New UI sidebar that includes detailed information and documentation links for forms and tasks
Support for AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 9, and RHEL 9
Improved Migration tool, which includes incremental imports and re-syncs, DNS updates, and other tools to assist with migrations
However, as it states in the linked announcement post for EL9, only IW8 can be installed on EL9. We will not be providing EL9 support for IW7. EL9 support is also technically public beta.
No, at this time we do not have a clickable walkthrough like we do for IW7. I can give you a demo key if you’d like to try it on a test server–just submit a ticket.
Thanks for the info, figured that this probably wouldn’t be supported. For now using TuxCare’s “CentOS 7 End of Life Extended Lifecycle Support”, until InterWorx 8 + EL 9 are no longer beta, then the migration fun is going to start
If in place upgrade will not be possible…what can be done to improve the process to migrate?
Today SSL certificates work only after DNS has been adjusted. This means downtime for my customers as SSL is the standard. Also it takes a huge effort to migrate the domains. And after migration mail is still coming into the old server. Is there a process to get the latest email synced to the new server? So many questions to migrate without any/hardly any impact for my customers.
Migrating in large volumes is always risky
Im not seeing your issue unless that’s your approach
I suggest lowering ur dns TTL on groups of Eg 10 at a time migrate in batches
It would be a nightmare to migrate Eg 150 siteworx accounts propegate only to find out there is issues to be manually corrected in each one
And always notify customers of pending server changes/upgrades at 4 weeks in advance
You can make a copy of the SSL certificates (Even the Let’s Encrypt ones) and import these, or just copy them over. I’m not sure if that already happens when creating a backup/do a mass migration, has been a while since I’ve done that, but manually, it is still possible, might be as simple as just doing an rsync of them, haven’t looked in to that yet. But regenerating new Let’s Encrypt Certs for all sites might also be a solution, it can probably be done with a bash script an the iworx cli, but also haven’t looked in to that yet.
If you want to/or are able to reuse the IP of the old server then go for that and you don’t need to do anything with DNS records. I see from my notes from migration CentOS 4 & 5 to CentOS 7 that I gave the new server the same IP as the old one, and deactivated the IP or interface on either the old or the new server while migrating, however you would need at least an additional IP on each server for the import.
Back then, in 2018, I did the migrations on the LAN, so I could just deactivate the external interface on the old server and gave the new server the same IP on the external interface. I did this to prevent new data coming in the old server (think mails, database changes etc). This involves some downtime, but it prevents a split brain, and doing it in the night, nobody cares about the downtime.
Regarding the mails, if you go with the above approach, the mail server isn’t available at all, which is a good! If it would be available it would be delivered in the old server during the migration and if you would have deleted the account and the mail server would still be available, then the sender is getting a delivery error.
It’s perfectly fine that the emails will not be delivered when the mailserver isn’t available. Most, if not all mail servers retry every couple hours to deliver those mails, for a couple of days. Since the downtime is less than that, it will be fine although people might receive mails a bit later, although if you do the migration during the night, nobody would probably have issues with that.
SSL certificates are not included in the back up but your exactly right about moving the IP address if that’s an option to you
I think back in 2019-2020 I was running off a few vps machines the provider I think was vpsserver they assisted me by moving the IP address most vps providers I think would but failing this
It all really comes down to planning
Look at requirements of all siteworx accounts
The bulk migration tool is really solid for this to migrate a few at a time in batches monitoring progress and so forth I think interworx team have done a great job with there bulk migration
IW8 includes a new migration tool that allows the ability to re-sync information after the initial import, so that everything is as up to date as possible before switching over the DNS.
At this time, there are a few known bugs for IW > IW imports, so we do not recommend its use right now (and it’s all beta right now, anyway), but that is something that will make it all a bit easier.
The standard single account and mass transfer tools do not have any known issues.
Most of the known issues with the new migration tool are resolved in the version of Iw8 that is currently in the beta channel (8.0.25).
I did find a potential new one with re-syncing information, but if you would like to test the new tool, feel free to do so. The more eyes on it the better–the issues that were fixed in 8.0.25 made it not work at all, which is why I made that disclaimer a few weeks ago.
Litespeed is supported in IW8. It is just not supported with the in-place upgrade tool (this is the same when we added the tool to upgrade IW6 > IW7).
Litespeed is just such an edge case–we have only a handful of customers who use it–that is isn’t possible to properly test the in-place upgrade with that third party software.
If you’d like to test the beta with litespeed, it will need to be a new install on a new server. If you’d like a demo key for testing, just submit a ticket.
Thanks Jenna. It’s a new managed server with liquid web. Nothing deployed on it yet. Ideally we would build with Alma 9 and the new interworx 8, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed as it’s managed (?)
Liquid Web has not yet rolled out its deployment of IW8 on EL9, since it is still public beta, so I know that isn’t an offering they have available, yet. I don’t know their rules for managed set ups–Liquid Web would be a better point of contact for how to perform a task like that on their servers.
