Ensim Support
As of Jan 1st, 2011, rackAID will no longer be providing support for Ensim powered servers. If you are currently using Ensim, we highly recommend you migrate to Parallels Plesk. Ensim is no longer well supported by Parallels or many managed services companies. As it turns out, my prediction that Parallels (then SWSoft) acquired Ensim to can a competitor, much like Sun did to the popular Cobalt Raq, was correct. The subsequent releases by SWsoft were already in the works and there was really no functionality added to the product after their acquisition.
Ensim End of Life
The last version of Ensim was released on 4/16/2009. Since then there have been a few hot patches but no significant upgrades. Ensim 4 has not been updated since 2007. If you are still using these versions of Ensim, you likely are using an outdated OS. We recommend Red Hat Enterprise 5 and will soon be moving to Red Hat Enterprise 6 once software vendors release their updates for the new RHEL version.
Ensim Options
Shared Hosting Servers
The best option for Ensim users is to migrate to Plesk. Plesk version 8.x has a migration utility that will import data from Ensim servers. While there are many bugs, this can be a lot easier than moving dozens of sites manually. For some reason, Parallels dropped Ensim to Plesk migration in Plesk 9 and above. When we were doing Ensim migrations, we would first migrate to Plesk 8 and then upgrade Plesk 8 to Plesk 9. This was the easiest way to move large shared hosting systems.
Few Domains
If you have just a few domains, you may want to migrate manually. You can then select between Parallels Plesk or WHM/cPanel products. Other hosting control panels just do not offer the same feature sets as these two market leaders.
Ensim Migration Tips
Here are some items to look out for if you migrate from Ensim to another system:
- Ensim permitted domains to have the same “admin” user account name. This is not allowed in cPanel or Plesk.
- Ensim had different “security” modes for the site. These modes may not apply on other systems. As a result, scripts may fail.
- Ensim uses a different path structure than does either cPanel or Plesk. So any hard coded paths will need to be updated.
- Ensim uses majordomo as the underlying mailing list manager. This too may change and mailing list may not migrate properly.
- Ensim uses long names “[email protected]” for email logins. You may need to assure this option is enabled on your new server.
- Ensim’s MySQL version may not match your new version. We have seen issues with tables lacking data when using Plesk’s import tool.
These are just a few of the items we have encountered.
The last thing we recommend is making a full backup of the old server or keep it online for a few weeks after the move. This way if the migration tools or your manual migration misses anything, you can go back and get the data.
Ensim Users
Are you (were you) an Ensim user? If yes, I would like to know what control panel you move to and why. Are there things you miss about Ensim or are you glad to be on your new system.