Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very important milestone for us since we have a lot of Centos 7 servers and can't go to RHEL. From my point of view, there are more or less three solutions:

a. Go to Debian (or ubuntu server etc); probably the most difficult since everything will be different b. Go to a fresh Almalinux or Rocky 9 installation; also very difficult since there's a lot of stuff to be moved c. Try to use in-place upgrade using Leapp or something. There are some guides for this (https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevating-CentOS7-to-Alma...) but I'm really not sure how good this would work on a live production system.

I'd definitely prefer the solution c, if I can confirm that it works of course. Has anybody tried using leapp to upgrade Centos 7 to Rocky/Alma ? What was your experience? Do you feel that it's worth researching that path or it's probably better to move to a greenfield installation?

Thank you for any insights!

For what it's worth, we're trying to do a lot of our server upgrades with the Elevate scripting to Almalinux, but man can it be a pain. We have a 30% success rate in testing, and even when it goes right it tends to be 2-3 hours of downtime. The alternative though is to rebuild every server on spare hardware and manually migrate data and configurations over. So it's still a better option once we can figure it out. I'm hoping to get downtime <1hr and >90% success rate before we start really pushing through these by April.

That's a bummer! I know there's a few places that have used it on the 50k+ scale, so once the kinks for your environment, it should be great. If there's anything that can be done to improve the script, we'd love to help! Feel free to join the chat and share what's up in ~migrations.

We briefly looked at it. We decided to just move everything to Ubuntu. It's been a lot of work, and taken a lot of time, but ultimately we feel that it's been worth it. Ubuntu isn't without it's own problems but we're much happier today and feel that we're more future-proof for it.

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