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AlmaLinux Announces ELevate Project to Migrate or Upgrade Any Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Distro
jonathanspw
Member, Host Rep
AlmaLinux Announces ELevate Project to Migrate or Upgrade Any Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Distribution
Open source initiative simplifies migrations from older CentOS versions to alternativesALL THINGS OPEN, RALEIGH, N.C., October 19, 2021 – The AlmaLinux OS Foundation introduced today the ELevate Project, an open source initiative to assist users perform migrations between different Red Hat Enterprise Linux based distributions, such as CentOS 7.x to AlmaLinux 8.x, Oracle Linux 8.x, or Rocky Linux 8.x. The announcement was made today at the All Things Open conference.
ELevate consists of two key components, enhancements to the open source Leapp project and a data library and toolset called the Package Evolution Service.
The enhancements to Leapp are currently contained on GitHub in the leapp-repository, where the AlmaLinux community has already added the necessary code to support RHEL derivatives and additional functionality needed to perform the migration. Work has already begun to have these changes merged upstream.
The Package Evolution Service (PES) includes a web interface for working with the data library that contains metadata which describes the list of configuration changes required for the migration. Developers and software vendors can create and submit PES data for their own applications or packages too, ensuring that migrations can be performed smoothly.
“Until today, it simply wasn’t possible to dream of migrations like these and that need has become very acute for CentOS users,'' said Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux. “This is a cause the whole community can get behind. We’re often asked if there are any plans for collaboration between the various downstream projects and this is a great example of something that everyone, AlmaLinux, Oracle and Rocky communities can contribute to. We’re working with upstream on the tooling while creating a PES that is free and open to all for this reason. Oracle was very gracious to contribute a nice chunk of the metadata set and our hope is that the Rocky community and developers will be receptive as well,” he said.
ELevate is open source, released under the Apache 2.0 License. You can learn more at ELevate site and on the AlmaLinux Wiki. Migrations can be done in place, meaning data and configuration files are preserved and please be mindful of best practices including backups and snapshots when making system changes.
About AlmaLinux
AlmaLinux OS is an open source, community-governed and forever-free enterprise Linux distribution. It is focused on long-term stability and delivering a robust production-grade platform. It is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL(r) and pre-Steam CentOS.The AlmaLinux OS falls under the purview of The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, which is a 501(c)(6) non-profit created for the benefit of the AlmaLinux OS community.
Additional info:
https://chat.almalinux.org
https://almalinux.org/elevate
https://pes.almalinux.org/
https://github.com/AlmaLinux/leapp-repository/tree/almalinux
Enjoy 
Comments
Ha, will use this to switch to Oracle. I know they'll be around but not both Alma and Rocky in a few years.
It's Oracle, there's always the chance they'll send you a bill when Larry decides he needs to build a spaceship with Bezos.
@DA_Mark how would Directadmin react to a user doing this to move from EL7->EL8?
Would it require 'reinstalling' DA on top of itself? Maybe just a mass rebuild?
Francisco
@DA_Mark reach out to me (or I'll reach out to you). I want to work with you on making sure this is a supported path in DA.
EDIT - sent you and John an email.
I attempted this on two separate CentOS 7 stock systems and it was relatively painless. Any potential problems it pointed them out. With a tiny bit of knowledge it was quick and easy to resolve and/or work around. I'm looking forward to hearing about it being done in more production environments opposed to just in theory. Exciting ones I'd look forward to would be the various control panels out there the ability for them to go EL7-EL8.
We have a lot of work to do for support for 3rd party repos but yeah right now on a system with stock repos and nothing else it's quite painless.
We welcome everyone to contribute metadata for packages they use not covered by the stock repos.
Hopefully IBM is shitting themselves for lack of foresight.
This just got announced today and I'm not sure of the technical implications, so I will ask @smtalk to pop in here and answer that.
With Elevate, I just tested it in a plain CentOS 7.x and it is fine. It is taking so long a bit and can expect down time because when you reboot, it will stuck in the console doing the upgrade until it finished.
My manual method is much faster and less down time. Just a reboot in less than 3 mins.
I already tried CentOS 7.x to CentOS 8.x then to AlmaLinux 8.x with DirectAdmin in it and it works well
Not recommended for cPanel as it is messy and can fail because they are using rpm most of the software while DA most software are from source so it is easy. Tested already
Of course, you need to have all the knowledge and understanding on how DA works and make sure to have backup.
We haven't tested it out yet, but it should work just fine with DirectAdmin. We'd suggest executing the following after the upgrade:
cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
./build update
./build all
Cant wait to test it, this will save many hours when migrating this way
Quoting the FAQ:
"Currently ELevate provides Leapp data for migration from CentOS 7 to the following OS:
AlmaLinux OS 8, CentOS Stream 8, Oracle Linux 8, Rocky Linux 8"
So it's CentOS 7 as source, and those distros as destinations. The word "currently" is interesting though. In the future, will this product support moving from, say, Alma 8 to Oracle Linux 8 or Rocky 8 to Alma 8?
Yes, if the proper metadata is contributed to do so nothing is preventing exactly this.