Today we are pleased to announce that Plesk offers official support for ARM architecture.
Our new reality is affected by the electricity crisis – most European providers were forced to announce price increases in 2022, as a result of the increased electricity prices. One of the main advantages of using ARM architecture is cost efficiency, as less power is consumed.
Since the release of Plesk Obsidian 18.0.46, the Plesk Panel is available and can be installed on Ubuntu 22 with ARM architecture. You can get a VPS with Plesk Panel on Graviton2 processors with one click, using Plesk AWS AMI image or an Oracle Cloud Marketplace. By deploying the Plesk Panel on VPSes with ARM CPUs, you can reduce server resource costs while maintaining high performance. By deploying Plesk on VPSes with ARM CPUs, you can reduce server resource costs while maintaining high performance.
With the release of Plesk Obsidian 18.0.41, we announced a technology preview and started Plesk beta-testing. It is available for installation on Ubuntu 20 with ARM architecture.
Over the past eight months, we have seen demand for this technology, and hundreds of Plesk servers are now running on ARM. We thank all our customers for their feedback. It is available, for example, in our forum thread. Based on the feedback, we have fixed found issues, removed certain limitations, and added support for popular Plesk extensions.
Today we are pleased to announce official support for Plesk running on ARM servers.
We have already talked about the ARM architecture and why you should use servers based on it before.
See our previous article.
News about ARM
- TrendForce predicts that the penetration rate of ARM-based servers will reach 22% by 2025 with cloud data centers leading the way.
- ARK Invest forecasts that in 10 years, 75% of the server market will be ARM/RISC-V systems.
Chips and chipmakers are under active development
- In 2021, ARM Limited announced the availability of the ARMv9 architecture, which features a significant performance increase over previous versions.
- Nvidia was prohibited from acquiring ARM Limited. However, since Nvidia has a 20-year architecture license from ARM, the company wants to build a complete family of ARM chips with its own cores, including chips for servers. Delivery of the chips is planned for early 2023. It is a 144-core Grace CPU Superchip based on the ARMv9 Neoverse architecture. Nvidia claims its simulations of the 144-core Grace chip show that it will be 2X faster and provide 2.3X higher power efficiency than two 36-core 72-thread Intel ‘Ice Lake’ Xeon Platinum 8360Y processors.
- According to the Cockroach Labs cloud report, ARM-based Graviton2 chips outperform AMD EPYC 7002 and Intel Xeon Platinum in multi-core tests.
The ecosystem wants to grow
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS features ARM optimizations as the release headline: “(…) To ensure great performance on Arm, Canonical also optimized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS images for AWS Graviton… on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, developers get a highly optimized operating system … This includes the latest Arm servers, Ampere A1, where we provide high-performing and cost-effective solutions for all types of workloads.”
- Apple is not the only company that has installed ARM-based processors in its laptops. ARM chips from Qualcomm and Mediatek also power a new generation of Windows notebooks.
Hosters are offering more and more ARM-based computers
- Hetzner launched new ARM-based dedicated servers in July 2022 after announcing its collaboration with Ampere for new offerings.
- Microsoft Azure announces the preview of Ampere- and ARM-based virtual machines and claims ‘Up to 50%’ better price-performance than x86 equivalents for Azure VMs, powered by Ampere’s ARM CPUs’.
- Google Cloud offers the preview of Ampere-based ARM virtual machines.
- AWS continues to drive Graviton-based instances for all services with their AWS Graviton Fast Start program.
- Alibaba Cloud has started the preview program of an instance type powered by its in-house 128-core ARMv9-compatible CPU.
Opportunities for your business?
In conclusion, we would like to highlight the following advantages of using Plesk on ARM servers:
- You can save more than 40% on server resource costs while maintaining the same performance.
- It is a climate-friendly technology. Using ARM processors can help to reduce your carbon footprint.
- You can run Plesk on Raspberry Pi. Although we do not recommend this configuration for production, you can use it for entertainment and educational purposes.
- You have ARM as an additional choice if you are not satisfied with Intel/AMD (because of quality, costs, or competition).
Try running Plesk on Ubuntu 22 with ARM CPUs by installing it from the official distributive repository or using images for AWS or OracleCloud Marketplace.
We would be more than happy to hear your opinions about this configuration. Please share your thoughts and report issues in the Forum’s thread.
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