general thoughts on upgrading from SLES11 to SLES12

We are at the point in our environment where we’re ready to start moving existing boxes from SLES11sp4 to SLES12sp2. I’ve gone back through about a year’s worth of threads and it seems that it can be problematic at best. I’ve already run into the libpango error and of course there is the beloved “file system is mounted using kernel name…blah, blah,blah” error.

So what I was wanting to know where your general thoughts on trying to upgrade. Is it worth it? Will I spend the next 5 years dealing with ramifications of this upgrade? Or is it better to simply build a new 12 box from scratch and move the applications/data over to it? Or perhaps you’ve had ZERO issues with upgrades?

Hi,

On 31.08.2017 15:54, jgosney wrote:[color=blue]

We are at the point in our environment where we’re ready to start moving
existing boxes from SLES11sp4 to SLES12sp2. I’ve gone back through
about a year’s worth of threads and it seems that it can be problematic
at best. I’ve already run into the libpango error and of course there
is the beloved “file system is mounted using kernel name…blah,
blah,blah” error.

So what I was wanting to know where your general thoughts on trying to
upgrade. Is it worth it? Will I spend the next 5 years dealing with
ramifications of this upgrade?[/color]

if you are on VMware, you might want to consider their support policy:
“VMware does not support the installation of major update releases on an
OS” https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2018695


Norbert

Hmmm, good note! That’s actually interesting. They (VM) will support SLES12sp2 as a clean install but not SLES12sp2 as an upgrade. Must be some internal technical reasons for that.

On 08/31/2017 03:54 PM, jgosney wrote:[color=blue]

So what I was wanting to know where your general thoughts on trying to
upgrade.[/color]

Provided you have an up to date documentation of your existing servers
together with a working installation environment doing a fresh install
might be faster. You might also want to run the new system in parallel
with the old one for some time in order to fix initial problems. AFAIK
there is no upgrade route for BTRFS and snapper. So if you want to use
the new features that come with these you will have to do a fresh
installation anyway.

Günther