CentOS 7 to 9 migration

[Ólafur Jónasson]

Hi everyone,

My organization is currently in the process of migrating all machines from CentOS 7 to CentOS 9. I am trying to figure out the best way to migrate our beegfs setup:

CentOS 7.9

beegfs Version: 7.2.5

2 Storage nodes (with 5 targets each)
2 metadata servers

I am aware of how to backup the beegfs system configuration for the different services (https://doc.beegfs.io/latest/advanced_topics/backup.html). What I am worried about is that the system configuration will not be compatible between our current beegfs v7.2.5 and our planned beegfs version on CentOS 9 (latest; v7.3.3).

I looked through the beegfs wiki and found that there are no beegfs versions between 7.2.5 and the latest  (7.3.3) that support both CentOS 7 and CentOS 9.

Does anyone have any advice on how to accomplish the CentOS 9 migration? We want to avoid having to rebuild the beegfs instance because backup/migration of all data (~500 TB) would take a long time. We do of course plan on backing up  data that is not (relatively) easy to replace.

Thanks,

Oli

[Jure Pečar]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2023 07:44:58 -0700 (PDT)
Ólafur Jónasson <olafur....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> My organization is currently in the process of migrating all machines from
> CentOS 7 to CentOS 9. I am trying to figure out the best way to migrate our
> beegfs setup:

Should be trivial. Beegfs on-disk format is pretty much the same between 7.2.5 and 7.3.3, there might be one or two changes in the beegfs config files. So you just update the OS, install fresh beegfs packages, put updated config files in place and things should just work.


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Jure Pečar
https://f5j.eu

[Denis Anjos]

Auth file will be mandatory on 7.3;

For a major version update, all pieces of software have to be on the same version (meta, storage, client), so you won't be able to serve CentOS 7 clientes after upgrading;

You should update all of your  OSs first; 

[Byron Shen]

It seems that CentOS 8 is supported by both 7.2.5 and 7.3.x. 

If upgrading to CentoOS 8 is an option, you can do that first, then upgrade beegfs to 7.3.x, and finally take a step to CentOS 9.

[Ólafur Jónasson]

Unfortunately, CentOS is EOL since end of 2021. My IT department will not install an EOL distribution.

Oli

[Andreas Skau]

Hi Olafur,

I've just done a CentOS 7 to Rocky 9 migration. I believe we were on BeeGFS 7.2.6 and went to 7.3.3. We have 4 metadata servers with zfs, 12 storage servers with xfs. This is on ConnectX5 FDR ib. No issues of note, except that the recommended nr_requests tuning of 4096 is no longer supported, so you have to reduce that to 2048.

Can't see any reason to go via an EL8-based installation.

Just back up your /etc folders, reinstall the servers (make sure you don't format the wrong drives by accident), install beegfs as before and apply the OS tuning as before. Also a good idea to re-read the storage and metadata tuning guides just to check that nothing was missed...

Good luck!

Andreas

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