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Upgrade the version of your Linux distribution – this is the message of the ELevate project. Today we will show you how to easily upgrade CentOS 7 to EuroLinux 8 with its help.

Upgrading infrastructure often lands at the bottom of the to-do list. It’s seemingly easier to extend maintenance contracts and do some work to keep older systems up and running for another year than to go through the process of buying and deploying new software. The question is: when does renewing software support begin to cost more than a replacement?

The cost of maintenance agreements begins to rise steeply the third year after the end of manufacturer support. By the fourth and fifth year, double-digit increases in expenditures can usually already be seen. In some situations, however, the annual cost of technical support for an older version of software can still be less than replacing that software with newer versions. The expenses incurred may be felt in the budget, but by themselves are not so painful as to force an IT infrastructure upgrade in the first year. However, if you add up the costs of extending support for older systems over several years, the sums turn out to be mind-boggling – and that is where the real challenge lies. We often look at things only in terms of this year or the next, which makes it easy to overlook the broader picture when it comes to actual spending on maintenance contracts.

ELevate is the answer to this problem

ELevate is a project that aims to provide the ability to migrate from CentOS 7 to major versions of RHEL 8.x-based distributions. It combines Red Hat’s Leapp framework with a community-developed library and service containing the metadata set required for migration. ELevate project allows an effortless migration from CentOS 7.9 to EuroLinux 8 while keeping both applications and data unchanged.

Implementation

The migration is fast, seamless and performed automatically in-place. The migration requires a minimum of 2 reboots (depending on the presence of SELinux). In accordance with best practices, it is recommended to back up your CentOS 7.9 installation in advance.

If you are using VMware virtualization software, you need to remove the existing SCSI disk device in VMware’s virtual machine settings. Then you need to add an IDE device and point it to the existing virtual disk that was used by the virtual machine – usually it’ll be the file <virtual machine name>.vmdk.

The migration comes down to running the following commands in CentOS 7.9:

sudo yum install -y http://repo.almalinux.org/elevate/elevate-release-latest-el7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install -y leapp-upgrade leapp-data-eurolinux
sudo leapp preupgrade
sudo rmmod pata_acpi floppy mptbase mptscsih mptspi
echo PermitRootLogin no | sudo tee -a /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo sed -i 's@PermitRootLogin yes@PermitRootLogin no@g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo leapp answer --section remove_pam_pkcs11_module_check.confirm=True
sudo leapp upgrade
sudo reboot

Then wait until the CentOS 7.9 version is automatically upgraded to EuroLinux 8. The entire process is shown in the video below.

https://youtu.be/LYqGOn40Gms

Summary

Upgrading IT infrastructure not only eliminates the work required to maintain legacy systems, but also provides additional functionality and automation features that facilitate infrastructure management, deployment and maintenance. These are provided by upgrading a system version using the ELevate project.