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We need to upgrade the hardware on some of our CentOS 5.11 servers. From Redhat's Intel CPUs and Supported RHEL Versions page, I see that the E5-26XX V2 CPUs are supported. However, the E5-26XX V3 (Haswell-EP) CPUs are listed as Not Supported.

I would prefer to use the V3 CPUs. Can anyone tell me if Not Supported means that CentOS 5.11 flat-out won't work? Or, perhaps might they work, but just not be able to take advantage of newer chipset instructions (like AVX2). We plan to upgrade to CentOS 6 or CentOS 7 soon, but not before the server upgrades.

Has anyone successfully run RHEL5/CentOS5 on E5-26XX V3 CPUs?

Gary Hanna
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  • Thanks for the good feedback, folks. My hope is to move to Centos 7 soon. No fear of systemd here. Looking forward to giving it a try. My plan is to order one E5-v26XX V3 system and finding out if CentOS 5 works or not. If it doesn't, I guess I'll be accelerating my CentOS upgrade plans. – Gary Hanna Dec 05 '14 at 00:05

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It will run, but it won't take advantage of any new CPU features. CPU upgrades are rarely or never an issue; where you will run into problems is with other hardware in the new server, such as storage and network drivers.

EL5 is in Production 3 phase, meaning no new hardware enablement will be shipped, and Red Hat expects existing servers to be virtualized onto newer hardware running a newer version of the distribution.

You might be better advised to use the new server(s) as a testbed for your CentOS 7 upgrade, or run C7 on them and virtualize C5 under it, or both.

Michael Hampton
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  • As the startup process has been seriously changed in RHEL7 / Centos 7....you might try at least upgrading to RHEL6/Centos6. – mdpc Dec 04 '14 at 06:28
  • @mdpc systemd is not _that_ scary! – Michael Hampton Dec 04 '14 at 14:24
  • Yes but if you are depending on other applications they might have NOT updated to the new startup scheme. – mdpc Dec 04 '14 at 22:08
  • @mdpc There's no problem there; a RHEL7 system will happily run the old-style init scripts. It even does the right thing if you try to use the old-style `service` and `chkconfig` commands on _new_ systemd units. – Michael Hampton Dec 04 '14 at 22:09
  • I understand.....my comment was just to point out possible things that you might not want to deal with going from 5-->7 at that time. – mdpc Dec 04 '14 at 22:10