[Beowulf] CentOS/RHEL 7 & major upgrades

[Christopher Samuel]

Hiya!

On 13/02/15 19:00, Olli-Pekka Lehto wrote:

> 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?

We went from RHEL5 to RHEL6 on our clusters about 2 years ago, we
started off with a new machine that went straight to RHEL6 and then the
other two existing Intel clusters had separate week long outages and we
treated it as essentially as a reinstall of each cluster from scratch.

We also transitioned from Torque+Moab to a pure Slurm solution at the
same time.

It meant a lot of rebuilding of software, but I was actually surprised
at how easily it went all up.

For a strategy for upgrades, I suspect that's really down to each site
as there will be differences in the resources available, the push/pull
from old to new plus the good old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

All the best!
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci