[CentOS] Upgrade Question

Wed Jan 11 13:17:07 UTC 2012
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 01/10/2012 12:55 PM, Gene Poole wrote:
> We've got about 200 existing servers running CentOS/RHEL 5.6 and all new 
> servers are being provisioned using CentOS/RHEL 6.1.  So that everything 
> is consistent we need to upgrade the servers running CentOS/RHEL 5.6. I've 
> searched the CentOS wiki, the Red Hat site, and the internet  looking for 
> something official on upgrading/migrating from CentOS/RHEL 5.x to 
> CentOS/RHEL 6.x.  There's got to be a way other than having 2 times 
> hardware.
>
> Any ideas???

Note, it does not take 2x the hardware ... you only need 1 extra machine
to convert 1 server at a time from 5.x to 6.x and when you get done, use
that do the next one. You can do more than one on a machine with VMs as
well (or as suggested, backup, format and bring on data, reconfigure)

You CAN (unsupported :D) also use a 6.x disc and run an upgrade over top
the old machine.  (It should offer that as an option for the install). 
But RH does not recommend or support upgrades done that way if using
RHEL, so use at your own risk.  Also please understand that things are
not going to "just work" after an upgrade from CentOS 5.x to 6.x.  For
example, if you have php based websites using php-5.1.6-x in CentOS-5,
you are likely going to have issues running them on php-5.3.x in CentOS-6.

The bottom line is that CentOS provides 7 years of support, but moving
between major versions requires that you reconfigure everything.  You
can still get support for CentOS-5.x through 31 Mar 2014, so you have
time before you need to move those 5.x servers to 6.x.

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