Everyone wants the newest things, and cPanel has heard you! For the past several months, cPanel’s Code Monkeys development team has been working hard to implement support for CentOS 7 in cPanel & WHM.
In cPanel & WHM version 11.50, we’re inviting you to a Technology Preview.
What does Technology Preview mean? While we have performed extensive testing on most of cPanel & WHM’s broad range of features, there are still a few kinks to work out. A Technology Preview allows our customers to try this new compatibility out now, in order to help us be certain of a seamless CentOS 7 integration. We strongly recommend that you test your preferred configurations on CentOS 7 thoroughly before you use cPanel & WHM with CentOS 7 on production servers.
Changes for CentOS 7
While we continue to make every effort to ensure that cPanel & WHM on CentOS 7 maintains the same functionality, some changes were unavoidable:
Installation and system requirements
- New installations on CentOS 7 servers will require at least 1 GB of RAM, though we recommend at least 2GB of RAM for heavily-populated servers.
- CentOS 7 installations should use the XFS® or ext4 filesystems.
- Due to changes in data storage, the system may report different total data sizes for migrations or backup restorations between CentOS 5 or 6 and CentOS 7.
Systemd support
While our previously-supported operating systems used the init.d system, CentOS 7 uses the systemd system to manage services. Because of this, we updated our product to ensure compatibility with both systems, including all of cPanel & WHM’s /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/restartsrv_* scripts.
We strongly recommend that you use these scripts in your cron jobs and custom scripts, even if you don’t use CentOS 7 yet.
cPanel-provided RPMs
We have rebuilt all of the cPanel-provided RPMs to be CentOS 7 compatible. However, if you use additional RPMs or custom modules, check to ensure that their dependencies have not changed.
For up-to-date information about the status of our CentOS 7 implementation, read our CentOS 7 Implementation Status documentation.
TL;DR?
CentOS 7 compatibility will arrive as a Technology Preview in cPanel & WHM version 11.50, and will be available with full support in version 11.52.
You can read more about CentOS 7 on the CentOS Project website.
