Is It Safe To Go From CentOS6.5 To CentOS 7 At This Time

Home » CentOS » Is It Safe To Go From CentOS6.5 To CentOS 7 At This Time
CentOS 6 Comments

I am looking for opinions and personal experience on CentOS7 for both grid and virtualized web environments. I am currently on CentOS6.5 in a production environment.

I am about to add about 50 more servers to my grid and am trying to identify the advantages and disadvantages of going to CentOS7. The good part is, that I have some tolerance for backing out and installing CentOS6.5 if 7 does not work out.

I read the comments about what CentOS7 brings but want to make sure that I am not introducing undue risk. Not seen a lot of issues with it.

I also have a small private cloud (VMWare esxi) and wanted to know if anyone was using CentOS7 there.

The basic question: Should I be holding off a little longer on going to CentOS7 in production?

Thanks

Dan

6 thoughts on - Is It Safe To Go From CentOS6.5 To CentOS 7 At This Time

  • *Personally*, I would say no. I would certainly be starting to use it in the lab and non-critical roles, but I will be waiting until ~7.2 before I consider using it in production.

    This is mainly based on the sheer amount of change that happened in EL7. It’s going to take time for bugs to get squashed and for users to get used to the changes.

    Digimer

  • I don’t think you’ll get a definitive answer for that. There are installation and operational differences that you’ll have to learn eventually, and probably the sooner the better. Most application environments won’t know the difference. If yours doesn’t, I’d go with
    7 and perhaps avoid having to re-install in the hardware’s lifetime and take advantage of the newer kernel and default xfs filesystem. There’s always the possibility of some unexpected version difference but you’ll have to deal with that sooner or later anyway. I have a few instances running under ESXi with no surprises. And I’ve seen a few unexpected hangs on one hardware instance but at this point don’t know whether to blame the hardware or software.

  • Dan Hyatt wrote:
    On the one hand, we’re starting to roll it out… *only* on new servers, and the servers we’re rolling it out on are *only* fileservers – a couple attached to RAID boxes, and the other two will be attached to RAIDs, but server home directories.

    I feel that I’d stay with 6.x unless there’s a must-have feature. Right now, I’m playing with stuff on those servers – for one, NetworkMangler is
    *extremely* noisy, and trying to find *full* examples of its configuration file… I’ve only found *tiny* bits and pieces. I think I got it to log only errors, but the startup was *noisy*, and the documentation leaves something to be desired.

    Oh, and it enables wireless. On a server. With no wifi. And I don’t see any ifcfg-‘s to set them to *off*.

    I really don’t like this “we’ll do everything” attitude, esp. when
    “everything” is intended for users of laptops….

    And the install, as I think I posted last week, was nasty – if I want anything other than it’s “let me partition *and* throw LVM on top”, it goes to choose disks… and selects *ALL* by default.

    So there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t like, and will wait to see if they fix it.

    mark
    mark

  • You don’t _really_ expect any of those things to change do you? I
    look at it it as more of a question of how long you have to deal with the operational differences among your production systems, which is probably going to be a long and annoying time under the best of circumstances.

  • True, and can’t be said better. And that was one (not the main though)
    reason I migrate to FreeBSD servers whose time came instead of upgrading them to more “Desktopish” Linux (took me a lot of effort to not repeat here someone’s “Windoze” comparison). I know I have no guarantee, but they
    (FreeBSD) have good record… Workstations though stay with CentOS (7
    now).

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Please do share more on what you’re missing in the docs. It’s always evolving, we can make it better at anytime.

    It’s hard to understand what you mean with a “full example” because we can have quite a bunch of layout setups, it’s hard to make a 1-fits-all in there.

    Tried nmcli d disconnect ?

    Marcelo