Migrate from Centos 7.9 to Almalinux 8.x

[RicRey]

The Almalinux project together with its large community have released a script that allows migration from Centos 7.9 to Almalinux 8.x, my question is is this compatible with Cpanel? According to the official almalinux page applications and configurations will be preserved but I would like to know if Have you officially tried this?



On the official website of almalinux he talks about it and it looks very easy to implement.

AlmaLinux OS - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System

An Open Source, community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution.

almalinux.org

I await your responses, and I hope you can try it in case you haven't, so you would help your of customers.

 

[andrew.n]

It is compatible with cPanel but only from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8 so CentOS 7.9 to AlmaLinux 8 is NOT supported and will potential break your system due to mismatching libraries.

 

[Maxin John]

HI,
I have tested the elevate project with minimal centos7 server ( which I used for SMTP relay with postfix) to Almalinux8 which was working fine. All packages and dependencies were upgraded and working fine under Alamalinux8 .. not tested centos7 with cPanel installed seems will not work for cpanel at the moment as there are lot of older packages were there centos7 cpanel which will not be worked under Centos8/Almalinux8.
need to test..

 

[RicRey]

It is compatible with cPanel but only from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8 so CentOS 7.9 to AlmaLinux 8 is NOT supported and will potential break your system due to mismatching libraries.

just in case I mean that there is now a new script developed by almalinux and its community to move from centos 7.9 to almalinux 8.x, it is not the same one that converts centos 8 to almalinux they are different scripts based on Red Hat technology for its conversion...

The script probably ensures that it updates the configurations and applications so that they have the latest packages in the conversion, I am testing on a server that I installed... and virtualized, when I have results I will let you know if there are any limitations or if something needs to be fixed, now I find the new script very interesting.

 

[andrew.n]

Very true! I'm old and outdated! sorry about that. Its fantastic news @RicRey, thanks for sharing.

 

[cPRex]

We're working on our own version of the Elevate tool and you can find more details on that here: cPanel elevate documentation

 

[RicRey]

We're working on our own version of the Elevate tool and you can find more details on that here: cPanel elevate documentation

This is much better news than the one I posted, the question would be does it work only with centos 7 or also with cloudlinux 7?


Note: At the moment I am working with a virtualized test server in KVM with Virtualizor, and I have installed a Test Cpanel in a virtual container, I am trying to update the main server to see if it is not broken or can be fixed and later I will try to update my cpanel test container to almalinux too "I'll use cpanel's elevate project to see if it works"... hope it all works.

 

[techAMIGO]

@cPRex,
its a great news , good to know

 

[cPRex]

@RicRey - currently CloudLinux is not supported through this tool. It's important to note this is still very much in beta, hence the "problems you might find" section.

 

[RicRey]

For those who are interested, the migration of a server with Virtualizor and KVM was a total success without failure, the Virtual Servers (VPS) work perfectly...

@RicRey - currently CloudLinux is not supported through this tool. It's important to note this is still very much in beta, hence the "problems you might find" section.

Now my goal would be to convert the cpanel installation to almalinux... but I have some problems and I want your advice...

My Cpanel has Cloudlinux 7 and I must first convert it to Centos 7 to be able to use the elevate Beta of CPANEL and thus pass Centos 7 to Almalinux 8 and from there re-install Cloudlinux converting Almalinux 8 to Cloudlinux 8, do you think it has any complications?

 

[cPRex]

That sounds like a lot of work and OS changing to me. I would think it would be easier to just perform a migration to a new system.

 

[RicRey]

That sounds like a lot of work and OS changing to me. I would think it would be easier to just perform a migration to a new system.

Is there a way to keep all the settings? in the event that you migrate to a new vps with almalinux?...

Since there are many configurations to do, just imagine all the details of cpanel, cloudlinux, imunify360, csf, litespeed, ufff it seems like a lot to me :P...

but in any case do you think that what I propose is feasible?

 

[cPRex]

It all technically sounds like it would work - there's no reason it shouldn't.

 

[hbouma]

I did distro upgrades from CentOS 3 to 6 for our cPanel servers back in the day - mostly Virtuozzo VPS containers because they had way to upgrade the distro even though CentOS/Redhat didn't have an official method. I had servers that went for over 10 years without needing to be reinstalled. Virtuozzo stopped providing this feature for 6 to 7 so when cPanel EOLed CentOS 5/6 (32 bit) are when I stopped doing these upgrades and my memory is a bit fuzzy on it now . Normally it wasn't that bad, you'd usually have to uninstall rpms that didn't like the switch (even some cPanel ones), do the distro upgrade , run then cpup --force (hopefully needing to update to a newer version as well), and everything would be working again after any touchups you had to do afterwards.

I can't say if this process still works because the obvious point is cPanel can't develop software for an unsupported operation. But it worked for a decade for us - if there is a way to get the OS upgraded, I don't think its impossible that cPanel can't get made to work afterwards either. It will likely depend on how good your server admin / cPanel skills are as you won't be able to open a ticket on it. lol. It might also be all the repairs you have to do makes it not as feasible as a fresh install as well.

 

[jazee]

I'm having similar thoughts with similar history as you.

I just looked at the Centos 7 EOL for maintenance updates, it's June 2024. I've been running on Centos 7 for what, 5 years now? And have quite a bit going on with certain configs, not 100% of course all done through WHM but probably 90% of it. SysAdmin isn't my primary skill but I have 20 years experience doing 90% of the work myself. I cringe at the thought of how many things are going to break by trying to do an in-place upgrade to Centos 8 then AlmaLinux (I've got all sorts of PHP scripts using all sorts of packages, Python using Selenium+Chromedriver, Configserver Firewall, yada yada) Yes, theoretically they should all come over but any SysAdmin with a lot of history knows these things virtually never go smoothly. Since I'm running on like a 5-year old (or more) config, it's probably wiser to do a fresh AlmaLinux install, migrate all the WHM/Cpanel stuff as much as Cpanel will allow and then see how much more work I have to do. It may take longer but seems like a lot of 'junk' could be left behind from an in place upgrade to Centos 8 then to AlmaLinux.

I'm holding out until if and when Cpanel introduces their own migration utility to get from Centos 7.9 to AlmaLinux. Maybe never going to happen? My gut is telling me to just hire an expert Sysadmin/DevOps Specialist to just migrate to a fresh install of the O/S, brief them on everything going on, on the server. Create a test checklist. They can then ,odify the local LMHOST mapping for the domains to map the domains to the new server just for the local machine and test. That way if it turns into a nightmare we can continue to hang on to Centos 7.9 while we troubleshoot all the issues.

Not looking forward to this but probably wise to do it by EOL of Centos 7 even though I'm not running anything that needs high-security (storing financial info, etc.)

 

[InternetTim]

mostly Virtuozzo VPS containers because they had way to upgrade the distro even though CentOS/Redhat didn't have an official method. I had servers that went for over 10 years without needing to be reinstalled.

It will likely depend on how good your server admin / cPanel skills are as you won't be able to open a ticket on it. lol. It might also be all the repairs you have to do makes it not as feasible as a fresh install as well.

@hbouma I did some research with my servers and found out that they are going to update to AlmaLinux before the end of Centos 7. They don't have a time for us, but we don't have to worry about doing it ourselves. Which is fine for me.

 

[cPRex]

I'm holding out until if and when Cpanel introduces their own migration utility to get from Centos 7.9 to AlmaLinux.

We're getting there:

ELevating cPanel & WHM | cPanel Blog

Welcome to the cPanel & WHM® contribution to the ELevate project by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation. ELevate enables upgrades between major versions of RedHat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) derivatives. At cPanel, we’ve created the cPanel ELevate tool that manages the ELevate process end-to-end so that...

blog.cpanel.com

It's not entirely ready just yet, but it's a project that's happening.