[Beowulf] CentOS/RHEL 7 & major upgrades

[Olli-Pekka Lehto]

Hi,

I’d be interested to hear if people have deployed or upgraded CentOS/EL 7 on their clusters and what their experiences are? Also in the more general sense, what kind of distro upgrade philosophy do you follow? Are there a long-term roadmaps that you build internally, for example?

Recently I’ve had some internal discussions about the prospect schedule of upgrading our systems from CentOS 6.x to 7. I’m not really keen on upgrading a major distro version unless there is a _really_ compelling reason to do so, especially as we have driver dependencies to Mellanox IB, Lustre, Tesla and Xeon Phi as well as a lot of ISV codes. However, it would be nice to hear what the current pain/benefit ratio of such an upgrade is. 

Best regards,
Olli-Pekka