[CentOS] Virtualising legacy CentOS 4.x servers

Wed May 14 17:58:18 UTC 2014
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Simon Banton <centos at web.org.uk> wrote:
>
> I look after a number of CentOS 4.x servers running legacy
> applications that depend on ancient versions of various things (such
> as MySQL 3.x) and which can't be upgraded without non-trivial
> development effort.
>
> I've been considering virtualising them and as a test have been
> trialling with a company that uses Parallels Cloud Server 6.
>
> However, I've run into a roadblock in that the Parallels Tools
> installer in PCS6 require a version of glibc higher than that which
> is available in CentOS 4.x (v2.5 required versus v2.3.4 installed).
>
> Without the guest OS tools installed it's impossible to migrate a VM
> from node to node or back it up without shutting the VM down first,
> which is less than useful.

If you are running physical machines now, you don't have that ability anyway...

> So I have two questions:
>
> 1) Does anyone know if there is a version of the PCS6 Tools built
> against glibc 2.3.4 available anywhere?
>
> 2) Is there an alternative virtualisation environment I should be
> looking at which fully supports CentOS 4.x as a guest OS? And if so,
> does anyone have recommendations for a hosting supplier that offers
> that environment (ideally UK based).

Does it have to be hosted?  You could run under KVM/Virtualbox/Vmware,
etc. on your own hardware.  If you have any internet exposure you
can't expect to survive long without update support, though.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com