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Last modified: March 10, 2022

Overview

In computing, availability is the term that describes a service’s uptime and response time. High availability is the quality of a system or feature that assures a high level of operational performance. This roadmap document describes the features and release schedule of the cPanel & WHM High Availability (HA) product initiative. These feature upgrades will be delivered across multiple releases of WHM & cPanel, as shown in the table below. Some of the elements of this HA initiative will revolve around evaluating technologies (e.g. file system configuration) for compatibility with cPanel & WHM servers, while other elements (e.g. DNS Load Balancing) will require software updates for implementation. We will provide HA Configuration Assistance (a guide or Help interface) as each feature is delivered.

Planned Start: Q4 - 2021

Planned Initial Delivery: Q4 - 2022 (v110)

Initiative Details

As research and development continue, we will update this roadmap with direction and information for each initiative listed, and new ones that are pursued in an effort to provide a highly available cPanel & WHM system.

Configuration Replication

A high-availability server must, by definition, maintain identical configurations across multiple machines in a cluster. We will upgrade our server configuration management system to keep configurations synchronized across all servers in the HA cluster.

File Storage Replication

High-availability storage (HA storage) is a file storage system that is continuously operational or provides targeted uptime. We will support features like disk redundancy, a key feature of HA storage, to store data in more than one place and eliminate single points of failure.

SQL High Availability Solution

High data availability is an important aspect of every database administrator’s life. We need to minimize and mitigate the issues related to database unavailability. In the production environment, we want to achieve the RPO (Recovery Point Objective, the maximum acceptable data loss) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective, the Maximum allowed downtime) goals of a production database service.

DNS Load Balancing

Load balancing is the practice of distributing traffic across more than one server to improve performance and availability. Organizations use different forms of load balancing to speed up both websites and private networks. Without load balancing, most Internet applications and websites would not handle traffic effectively or function correctly.

DNS-based load balancing is a specific type of load balancing that uses the DNS to distribute traffic across several servers. It does this by providing different IP addresses in response to DNS queries. Load balancers can use various methods or rules for choosing which IP address to share in response to a DNS query.

Directory Service Support

The nature of cPanel & WHM account data make replication and data integrity complicated. In order to have persistent nodes in a highly available cluster, we will abstract the account data away from any specific node.

Feedback

Join the conversation! Have questions? Want to know more?

Join us on Discord or contact our High Availability team.