Use Leapp to Upgrade from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to RHEL 9 In-Place

RHEL 9 arrived in 2022 as the delivery on a promise made back with RHEL 8: a new major version roughly every three years. With that faster cadence, easy in-place upgrades matter more, so in this video I use Leapp to take a RHEL 8.6 machine from my home lab straight to RHEL 9.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• One DNF command installs the whole suite. I install the Leapp tool, the pre-upgrade assessment, and the supporting packages in a single step, and honestly that’s really all you need to start.
• You have to name your target version now. Because RHEL 9 introduced support for multiple version targets, I show that you specify the target when you run the assessment, which then produces a JSON or text report you can review.
• This path is noticeably quicker than 7-to-8. I point out that the RHEL 8-to-9 upgrade takes fewer steps and fewer reboots than the previous version, and that many known issues are already documented in knowledge base articles linked right in the assessment logs.

If you have been putting off a major-version jump, this is about as painless as it gets.