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Note: this article needs to be rewritten for Plesk 8.x. It should still have some useful information though!

Preparing for a Plesk upgrade:

Note: I have written a script which takes care of most of this, downloads appropriate tarballs, etc. however I recommend that you only use it if you know what you're doing. It can be found here for Plesk 7.5.4, or here for Plesk 8.x (downloads both 8.0 and 8.1 tarballs).

First, start fetching the appropriate tarball from ftp://download1.sw-soft.com. If you are upgrading from a very old version, you may need multiple tarballs, as follows:

Plesk upgrade path:
5/6->7.0->7.1->7.5->8.0->8.1

While this is going on, you'll want to perform a full MySQL backup:

mysqldump -Q -A --opt -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` >mysqlbak.sql

And blow away the tomcat entries from the Components table (otherwise things can get really ugly, especially if it's a 7.0->7.1->7.5.4 upgrade):

mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` psa
DELETE FROM Components WHERE NAME LIKE '%tomcat%';

Make sure that /etc/init.d/mysqld exists. If the mysql init script is /etc/init.d/mysql, create a symlink:

ln -s /etc/init.d/mysql /etc/init.d/mysqld

Finally, MySQL... if upgrading from 7.1.x or earlier, you'll need to downgrade any 'custom' MySQL installs to 3.23 prior to upgrading, and reupgrade MySQL afterwards. Some database issues you may see in a 7.5.x->7.5.4 upgrade may also be resolvable this way, however it is not generally necessary to downgrade MySQL if the upgrade is just between minor versions. Alternatively, you may add the following to the mysql init script (add it right after the 'restart' statement) for the duration of the upgrade:

'status')
#service mysqld status
#RETVAL=$?
echo "Checking to see if MySQL Server daemon is running:"
echo "------------------------------------------------------"
echo "Running processes:"
ps auxww | grep mysqld | grep -v grep | grep -v status
echo "------------------------------------------------------"
;;

Alright, we're ready to move on to:
"The Plesk Upgradation" (cue ominous music)
First we need to install the dependencies (these can be found in the Third_Party.RHelX directory). Generally, you'll need at least the following... if there are any other required dependencies, you'll see them when you move on to the next part:
binutils
plesk-gcc
plesk-cpp
plesk-libstdc++
plesk-libgcc

After installing these, go into the rpm_RedHat_elX directory, and run:

rpm -Uvh base/* opt/bu/* opt/migration/* opt/api/* opt/updater/*

If there are any other dependencies required, you'll see them here, and chances are they're in the Third_Party.RHelX directory!

This is the part where everything either works, or explodes. If it works, congrats! If not, "do the needful" (you may find the Troubleshooting Plesk Upgrades article to be helpful, or the Plesk forums and their handy search feature!).

Once this is complete, you can either install everything from the tarball, or (my preference) log into the control panel, make sure everything looks ok, go to the updater (server->updater), check off everything that needs to be updated, and let the autoupdater do its thing. If there is a custom version of MySQL installed or something that prevents the rpms from installing, you'll find them in /root/psa/PSA_7.5.4. It seems like Plesk 8 doesn't do this any more, and so if the autoupdate borks out you'll need to download the tarball from download1.sw-soft.com.

Check that everything is working properly, and you are all set! Congratulations, the nightmare is over.