On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Craig White craig.white@ttiltd.com wrote:
For this reason it is often better to upgrade more frequently then every 7-10 years. Personally I have a 5 year max lifetime for my systems. Even then upgrades are painful and we try to stagger these so they all aren't due to upgrade at once.
if you think about it, perhaps you are making the case for using a configuration management system like puppet where the configuration details are more or less abstracted from the underlying OS itself. Thus once running (and I'm not suggesting that it is a simple task), migrating servers from CentOS 5.x to 6.x or perhaps to Debian or Ubuntu becomes a relatively simple task as the configuration details come from the puppet server.
If it is possible to abstract the differences, perhaps you aren't using all the new features and didn't have to upgrade after all...