ELevating cPanel & WHM

Welcome to the cPanel & WHM® contribution to the ELevate project by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation.  ELevate enables upgrades between major versions of RedHat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) derivatives.  At cPanel, we’ve created the cPanel ELevate tool that manages the ELevate process end-to-end so that systems administrators can safely and efficiently upgrade a cPanel & WHM server.   

Why ELevate Your cPanel & WHM Server? 

Sysadmins struggle when it’s time to do operating system upgrades. They’re very costly in both time and hardware. While many folks strive to create repeatable builds of systems, this is no small task when it comes to a cPanel & WHM server. We support varied customer and user bases; the product provides a broad range of configurations and software to both the server owner and the server user.   

To upgrade from one distribution to another usually involves wiping a server and rebuilding it from the ground up or purchasing another server and migrating the data at additional cost.  This forces a company to choose between living with an OS distribution that may no longer be the best choice for their business needs or going through a laborious upgrade process that may involve lengthy outages.    

The cPanel ELevate tool is designed to facilitate in-place upgrades between major versions of RHEL-based distributions.   cPanel, L.L.C. has added custom tools to the ELevate tool chest that facilitate the cPanel & WHM aspects of the server upgrade process. This improvement of the server upgrade process presents a best-of-both-worlds scenario for sysadmins and infrastructure decision-makers. 

Danger, Will Robinson! 

Please understand that the cPanel ELevate tool is currently under heavy development (beta/experimental). Centos 7 isn’t set to reach end-of-life (EOL) for another 2 years, but we wanted to start the feedback loop early so that customers will have a safe and easy way to transition from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 when that time comes.   

For More Information On The cPanel ELevate Project

This white paper is a high-level discussion of the cPanel ELevate process intended to provide decision-makers with the information they need to evaluate ELevating their cPanel & WHM servers.