[Beowulf] CentOS/RHEL 7 & major upgrades

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 01:41:18PM +1100, Christopher Samuel wrote:
> 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".
> 

There is a supported upgrade path on Red Hat Enterprise Linux from 6.5+ 
to 7 _IF_ you have no third party applications.

There's no such supported path on CentOS.

CentOS 7 is different enough from 5 and 6 that I would respectfully
suggest clean installs throughout.

There is a reason that I run Debian wherever I can (although I have
been interested for many years, I don't currently have a cluster
either at work or at home.) :)

All the very best,

Andrew Cater


> 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
> 
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