Upgrading to CentOS 7 (from 6.6) recommended?

Anyone tried it yet?

Or is a clean install the best way to go about it?

Is CentOS 7 recommended for Virtualmin? (What is the preferred OS for Virtualmin?)

Howdy,

Unfortunately, CentOS doesn’t provide a way to upgrade from one distro version to the next.

The only supported way to move to CentOS 7 from CentOS 6 would be to perform a migration.

There are instructions for doing that here:

https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/upgrades-and-migrations

As far as which the preferred OS is – that comes down to personal preference. We’d always recommend one of the Grade A supported distros though.

Joe and Jamie recommend CentOS. I recommend Ubuntu (any of the Ubuntu LTS releases are well supported). Debian is also well supported, though we generally find that distros support timeline to be too unpredictable.

-Eric

Thanks Eric.

I’ve used VM migrations before - they make migrating so much easier!

I do a lot of Ruby, and most Rubyists seems to prefer Ubuntu. But I’ve had CentOS on my servers for years and it has always been rock solid.

How do you find Ubuntu?

Howdy,

Well, it’s a personal preference thing – I like Ubuntu best, and I recommend it. But other people recommend other distros based on their own experiences.

However, I find Ubuntu to be stable and have more up to date packages. I also like that it can be upgraded in-place, it doesn’t require a migration.

-Eric

Thanks Eric :slight_smile:

There actually is a documented upgrade path from CentOS/Redhat 6 to 7. People have had really mixed experiences with this, particularly if you are mixing in any third-party repositories.

Personally I’ve not tried this except on a test system, where it seemed to work. For a little more background read the Redhat 7 manual or see https://linuxacademy.com/blog/linux/centos-7-upgrading-from-centos-6-x-in-place/ or a number of other places on the web.

I would not try this on a server that really matters to you - usually just a clean install is faster and easier. But there IS a way to do it that is documented by Red Hat and CentOS