Hey everyone. I'm currently an Ensim user (4 boxes) and have recently thought of moving to Plesk because of comments from friends who have had a good experience with it.

Does anyone out there have past experience in migrating the two? Any stumbling blocks, or any reasons why you can think of not to move from Ensim?

Best regards,
0xCAFEBABE

We migrated dozens of systems from Ensim 3.5/4.x to Plesk 7.5/8.0.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. Very important: Ensim uses "user@domain.com" as the user/email format. Plesk can use this format or just "user". You toggle this setting in the mail panel in Plesk. For migrating, set it to use the long format (user@domain.com), so you don't have user conflicts.

2. Very important: Ensim permits sites to have the same admin user name. This can cause issues on plesk import. We advise checking the admin user name on each ensim site and making sure they are unique before migrating.

3. If anything was setup outside of ensim (like databases, extra system users), it will not be migrated. The tool uses the info in the ensim database, so if it was not done in ensim you will need to move it manually.

4. Paths will change. /home/virtual/site# will become /var/www/vhosts/domain.com. So any scripts with hard coded paths will break.

5. PHP settings and versions may differ. Some additional changes to Plesk's default PHP may be required.

6. Email. Have clients clear out their email. There is no easy way to directly copy email from the ensim server to the plesk server, so if an email import fails there can be a lot of manual work.

7. Customizations done in the /etc/httpd/conf/site# are not transferred.

That's about it, I am sure I am missing things but in general it is pretty smooth. Make sure you have the latest migration tools installed.

Also remember, Ensim uses one dbuser for all databases in the domain. Plesk uses a different admin for each database. This will cause Plesk to create the one account and every database (within that domain) after that will have no user. You'll have to go in, create the unique user then change the config for that site.

There are different rules for passwords between Ensim and Plesk. Plesk will fail to bring over any sub account/email user that doesn't meet its requirements. Thankfully it will print the failed accounts in the migration screen after its done. So you will have a list of each mail account that was killed. very handy.

One nice thing is that Plesk will automatically create and enable a domain account for every site. The bad part is I don't think it works with resellers. Meaning creating one client and adding multiple domains to it. I may be wrong on this though. But I don't think Plesk has any info on Clients at all. It simply creates a domain account and ignores the site admin's username. The saving grace to this is Plesk now allows you to easily change ownership of domains. so once your migration is complete you can add all the domains to the user's account to act as a reseller.