Upgrade from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to 8 with Leapp

Keeping your operating system current no longer needs to be a chaos-inducing process. In this video I introduce Leapp and demonstrate an in-place upgrade from a vanilla RHEL 7.9 virtual machine to RHEL 8, so you can skip the rebuild-from-scratch treadmill.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• Enable the extras repo, then install Leapp. Before anything else I turn on the server-extras RPM repository through subscription-manager and install the Leapp package. That is genuinely most of the setup.
• The answer file handles known incompatibilities. I walk through the Leapp answer file under /var/log/leapp, where a stanza tells Leapp to skip an incompatible PAM PKCS#11 module check so the pre-upgrade doesn’t fail on an issue that gets resolved during the upgrade itself.
• Leapp does the heavy lifting in passes. It inventories the host, swaps in the RHEL 8 repos, replaces base packages like glibc and the kernel, then the next layer like firewalld and NetworkManager, builds a new boot image, and relabels SELinux contexts on the final reboot.

Give me one leaping pun and I’ll show you a much calmer upgrade window.