2

Possible Duplicate:
Caveats when upgrading from Java 6 to Java 7 on hundreds of production servers

I am about to upgrade the RHEL version from RHEL 5.4 to RHEL 6.3 in a few hundreds of production servers.

The upgrade will be tested on a staging environment on virtual machines before production deployment.

Are there any backward-compatibility issues with RHEL upgrades?

Community
  • 1
Adam Matan
  • 12,504
  • 19
  • 54
  • 73
  • 2
    Are you performing ***in-place*** upgrades? If so, please see: [**Why is it so difficult to upgrade between major versions of Red Hat and CentOS?**](http://serverfault.com/questions/449048/why-is-it-so-difficult-to-upgrade-between-major-versions-of-red-hat-and-centos) – ewwhite Jan 30 '13 at 14:01
  • It's not in-place. The server is re-installed, and the existing software packages - in-house and external open source tools - are installed on the new operating system, so I guess my main concern is software package compatibility. – Adam Matan Jan 30 '13 at 14:10
  • @AdamMatan This is your environment, so you'll have to test the software side. I've given some general advice about basic differences, though. – ewwhite Jan 30 '13 at 14:17

1 Answers1

5

I wouldn't run the upgrade process this way if you're planning to perform in-place transitions from EL5 to EL6. It's not an easy or clean process.

See: Why is it so difficult to upgrade between major versions of Red Hat and CentOS? and Upgrade CentOS 5.x to CentOS 6.x - tips and techniques

However, you have the right idea of testing this in a limited-capacity first.

Regardless of deployment technique, the biggest issues I saw in moving from EL5 to EL6 were:

Community
  • 1
ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799