How to encourage to migrate to RH 6 ?
We have several RH servers with many, many RH 5 servers. There many types of applications running on them
like web servers, databases, in-house apps, external, commercial apps (imagine anything you can ...).
Applications owners/admins are not really eager to migrate to RH 6 since they value RH 5 stability and can't see any advantage of migration to 6.
Can you recommend anything I could use to "help" them decide to migrate (of course I don't want them to force to do that) ?
All the changes between RH 5 and 6 are known for me (and there are a lot of white papers about it) but any list what might be
encouraging for applications administrators (not Linux administrators) ?
One is RH Software Collections.
Anything else ?
Responses
“Applications owners/admins are not really eager to migrate to RH 6 since they value RH 5 stability and can't see any advantage of migration to 6.”
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Show them RHEL 6 is stable by having then test on RHEL 6.
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“not really eager” is not a valid reason in my opinion, migrations are a part of their job as app admin?
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“can't see any advantage of migration to 6” application administrators are not system administrators, they don’t have to see the advantages to OS upgrades, that’s what system administrators do/are for.
Same goes for system administrators; they don’t always see the advantages of a new application when application administrators do see the advantages
Hope it helps.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 life cycle is moving into Production Phase 3 - which means only critical issues will be considered/included. Only a very small number of issues will get fixed based on this criteria. Yes, this increases stability, but if an issue is hit, the likelihood of it being fixed is very small.
The ISVs see this, and some new products will undoubedly not support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 given where it is in the product life cycle.
So it depends on the requirements of the systems today, and what are the future (short and long-term) requirements going forward.
The decision to migrate comes down to costs. It costs money to migrate from one OS/version to another (new hardware, integration/testing, etc.). It typically costs in service-outages. It costs in new and unknown risks. You have to be able to make the business case to a tenant/application-owner/etc. that shows that the costs of moving to the new OS/version are less (over some definable time-scale) than the costs of staying on the current OS/version.
Przemyslaw,
The list of I want to's depends on the applications. There are still applications that trigger the respond: I cannot. For the RHEL6 and probably next year RHEL7 support release is not available.
For example take Oracle 12, it took over a year before RHEL6 was certified.
The new hardware that is certified for RHEl6, I guess your application administrators do not care. It becomes interesting to them once they experience performance issues you cannot fix on the current hardware.
Kind regards,
Jan Gerrit
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