For many years I have recommended startup companies install and work with CentOS until they need and can afford RedHat Enterprise.  The idea, because the two are binary compatible, the applications the company uses and develops will migrate between the two without changes.  I have even said you can do an inplace migration between them.

I’ve been challenged to prove an inplace migration is possible.  This is the results.

There are a couple packages that define a CentOS/Redhat system.

• The centos/redhat-release package

This package hold the release files, product GPG keyes and repository config files.

• redhat-logos

This file hold the proprietary artwork owned by the vendor.

You might have packages installed not provided by your vendor.  You can list all the vendor names of installed packages with this:

Dell Inc
CentOS

In this example “Dell Inc” packages are also installed. You can list the packages installed for a single vendor with this command:

Migrating CentOS to Redhat

You’re starting with an existing CentOS system.  I’m using a CentOS 6.2 x86_64 minimum install not updated.  I’m migrating to Redhat Enterprise Server 6.3 x86_64.

Why a minimum install?  Because this is what I recommend for application servers like MySQL.

This process is simplest if you are moving to the next minor release. A migration to the same release (6.2 CentOS to 6.2 RHEL) is possible but will require you manual replace more packages.  I can not recommend a migration to the next major release.  Although a migration from 5.8 to 6.0 might work, configuration files and sometimes whole subsystems are replaced.

To do an update you need a repository to update from.  You can use a local Redhat repository if you have one, or you can use a Redhat CD.

Type this into the file.

You need to remove just a few files if they exist.

Now you can install them back from the CD repository.

Then update to the latest release.

Now you need to register/entitle  the server with Redhat.

REBOOT

To purge your system of the last of the CentOS packages (now that you are registered) do:

You may still have a few packages left.  The kernel doesn’t get replace unless you force it and some packages are specific to CentOS.  The boot loader for example.  (Do you care?)  In my test I still had:

kernel
libxml2
libxml2-python
plymouth
plymouth-core-libs
plymouth-scripts

How you have upgraded to the next release but you still need to update bug fixes from the Redhat repository.

With all updates, you should go through your system and look for *.rpm.save and *.rpm.new files.  These are created because of changes made to configuration files on your system.  If the OS thinks it can’t safely replace your .conf file with it’s you get a .rpm.new.  If the OS knows it has to replace your .conf file for the application to work you’ll get a .rpm.save.  Either way you should review the differences and correct what’s needed.

Full install Test

To really test this process I did a FULL install with 1,858 packages.  I installed CentOS 6.2 and selected every package I could. I didn’t select virtualization because I was running the test in VMware. I also didn’t select the mainframe option. (Anyone want to lend me a mainframe?)

The full install went almost as simply as the minimum install except, I had to uninstall firefox before I did the ‘yum update’.

Of the 1858 packages (not including dependencies) 1077 were updates done by the ‘yum update’ command. This left 1325 packages that were the same release as CentOS.  You could leave them in place.  I found the system worked fine.  I tested many of the stock applications  in X-windows without issues.

The purge of CentOS files with “yum reinstall” also went well.  It found another 1229 packages leaving 97 packages still manufactured by CentOS.  Most of the remaining packages where packages that had Redhat equivalents but the package names didn’t match.  For example:

You can go through by hand and replace these if you are just have to get rid of CentOS 100% or your crazy.  Again, the system works just fine without replacing these files.

Some packages not have a replacement on the CD. Most are like OpenOffice. If you need such a thing you might have just installed the CentOS version anyway.  Maybe these are available in the EPEL repo?

CentOS
autocorr-en ?
ekiga ?
farsight2 ?
gssdp ?
gupng ?
hyphen ?
hyphen-en ?
iwl6000g2b-firmware ?
libnice ?
libpurple ?
libtextcat ?
lpsolve ?
mythes-en ?
opal ?
openchange ?
openoffice ?
pidgin ?
ptlib ?
samba4-libs ?

Cruft

Maybe for my next trick I’ll build a list of files from a CentOS to Redhat install and a straight from CD Redhat install and compare them to see if there are any crumbs left over.

In place upgrade – Redhat to Centos

These instructions are from the CentOS Wiki – http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/MigrationGuide

To migrate from RHEL6 to CentOS 6 fetch the latest versions of the following packages for your architecture and put them in a temporary directory. Rather than fetching packages with wget, as shown below, the CentOS-6 installation media can be mounted and packages installed from it.
For CentOS 6.2 x86_64

One might want to download and add a few more look-and-feel items, or load them from the CentOS DVD:

With all updates, you should go through your system and look for *.rpm.save and *.rpm.new files.  These are created because of changes made to configuration files on your system.  If the OS thinks it can’t safely replace your .conf file with it’s you get a .rpm.new.  If the OS knows it has to replace your .conf file for the application to work you’ll get a .rpm.save.  Either way you should review the differences and correct what’s needed.

CentOS Redhat
at-spi.x86_64 at-spi-1.28.1-2.el6.x86_64
at-spi-python.x86_64 at-spi-python-1.28.1.-2.el6.x86_64
redhat-bookmarks redhat-bookmarks-6.1.el6
redhat-lsb-graphics redhat-lsb-graphics-4.0-3.el6
system-config-date system-config-date-1.9.60-1.el6

.

Tweet