[Beowulf] CentOS/RHEL 7 & major upgrades

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 07:50:52AM -0500, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 11:22 PM, Orion Poplawski <orion at cora.nwra.com> wrote:
> > On 02/13/2015 01:00 AM, 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?
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> > One issue hindering me:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1177032
> > kickstart install on machine with infiniband interfaces crashes
> 
> doh...well that's a non starter for me then...  funny i was just about
> to start testing RHEL7 on our clusters this week, looks like i'll have
> to find something else to do...

It may be that the kickstart doesn't install the appropriate modules but an install
from physical media might. For myself, I'm really not sure that CentOS 7 will remain
compatible with RHEL 7 for any length of time.

The upgrade from RHEL 6.5+ - 7 is, allegedly, feasible _if_ you have no third party
packages installed. Notably, it seems to me that CentOS will not support an equivalent
upgrade in place and Scientific Linux have explicitly disclaimed this as a possibility
and state that they will not support any attempted upgrade but only a clean install.

All the best,

AndyC

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