Discontinued support of features and components in Plesk Onyx 17.8

Both our users and us were often dissatisfied with a degree of Tomcat support in Plesk, but low demand for this feature did not allow us to invest more efforts into it. Tomcat usage among Plesk users has been steadily declining over the years, and our statistics do not show any evidence that this trend is going to change. Nevertheless, if the demand will be significant, we will consider a possibility of supporting Tomcat in some way.

What to do? Existing Plesk versions (up to Plesk Onyx 17.5) will continue to fully support Tomcat until their EOL. We will continue monitoring Uservoice for Tomcat support requests to evaluate Tomcat popularity and to assess the feasibility of creating a Tomcat extension. Alternatively, you can develop your own Tomcat extension using the Plesk Extensions SDK.

In the past, EZ templates for Plesk have provided higher density via sharing RAM/disk space for identical files. However, an embedded deduplication mechanism we use nowadays provides the same effect without using EZ Templates and makes usage of EZ templates redundant. At the present time, the popularity of Virtuozzo EZ templates among Plesk users is very low.

What to do? If you were using EZ Templates to install Plesk, we recommend to install and update Plesk using Plesk Autoinstaller. Refer to the links below to read about available Plesk Onyx 17.8 installation options:

Quick non-interactive Plesk installation with default settings and components
Custom non-interactive Plesk installation
Installing Plesk in the console
Installing Plesk in the browser

This used to be an excellent OS, but unfortunately, it’s outdated now – regular vendor support for “Wheezy” ended in April 2016, and long-term-support by volunteers will end on May 31, 2018. The number of people running Plesk on Debian 7 is quite low now, and since we are dedicated to focus our efforts on the latest, most secure OSes recommended by OS vendors, we are dropping Debian 7 support in Onyx 17.8.

What to do? For those who use Plesk on this OS, we recommend either migrating to a different OS using Plesk Migrator or running dist-upgrade to upgrade your Debian 7 instance (with the ability to upgrade from Debian 8 to Debian 9 in future).

The official vendor support for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 has ended on July 8, 2014, and we’d like to keep your server from using such outdated software.

What to do? Plesk Onyx 17.8 will work with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 if you install it on the server manually. However, we strongly recommend using up-to-date versions of Microsoft SQL Server still supported by Microsoft. You will also be able to continue using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 if it was installed on your Plesk server before the upgrade to Plesk Onyx 17.8.

Previously these modules were very…