Updating From Virtuozzo 6 to Virtuozzo 7
In September the EU will be introducing SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) It’s basically Two-Factor Authentication for online payments. To become compliant with the new payment protocol First2Host will have to update the client area. This is to support the new features. Without this upgrade, we would need to remove the ability of our customers to use a Credit or Debit card to pay for their services.
We have already been planning for the migration of Virtuozzo 6 to Virtuozzo 7 since January of this year. Codenamed project Desert Storm this project will see our network upgrade from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 bringing in new features. Virtuozzo VPS customers will get Version 3 Kernels. These support Docker and Ubuntu 18 but more importantly new features that will continue to keep our network secure. CentOS 6 will become end of life in the near future and at this point, security updates will cease.
As a responsible service provider, we feel that it’s imperative this update takes place as soon as possible. With the upcoming SCA implementation, we have decided to update our NVMe network first. If we were to implement project desert storm later in the year, that would mean two periods of downtime for our NVMe customers. By combining both updates into one we can limit the downtime for everyone.
What Will This Mean For You?
The only way to upgrade to CentOS 7 and Virtuozzo 7 is to;
1) Reinstall our nodes (the servers that power your virtual servers) with CentOS 7. This means lifting the data off the nodes, reinstalling with CentOS 7 then, placing the data back on the node.
2) Providing a new server with CentOS 7 and push your Virtuozzo 6 servers from the old node to the new Virtuozzo 7 node. This option means we have to rely on the hypervisor converting your container (VPS Server) from VZ6 to VZ7 smoothly.
We have decided to go with option 2 after running a month’s worth of tests converting VZ6 to VZ7. Yes, we have seen some errors in the way the hypervisor converts to VZ7 but it’s nothing we haven’t been able to resolve. We cannot stress how important this upgrade is for you and your services. The update to CentOS 7 will mean you are protected for years to come with security updates on the node. This, in turn, keeps our network secure and ultimately your servers online.
Now for some more positive news!
Since we are going to be utilizing a new server to migrate customers too we have decided to provide a server from our new dedicated server range. This range is being released with the new dedicated server control panel in the next few weeks but for NVMe users we are going to be using brand new Intel Xeon E-2136 servers. Launched by Intel last year these are fitted with 1TB NVMe sticks. we are using water cooling and overclocking the CPUs at a maximum 4.8GHz with the memory overclocked at 2666Mhz. These servers carry more vCores than the E3-1270v6 servers and are also about 30% faster at processing data once our overclocking settings are enabled. Your servers on the NVMe network are fast already but this should produce further speed results for everyone.
Once we have finalized the details we will be able to provide our users with a migration timescale. We hope this will be in the next month.
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