Upgrade In Place from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to 7

With RHEL 6 at the end of its life cycle, staying on a supported release matters more than ever. In this short tech tip I walk through the Red Hat Upgrade Tool and show how it can carry a system from RHEL 6.10 to 7.9 without the cost and disruption of a full redeployment.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• This is not Leapp. I make the point in the video that the Red Hat Upgrade Tool is a separate, older path built on the pre-upgrade assistant and the Red Hat upgrade tool packages. For 7 to 8 and beyond, we moved to the Leapp tooling we cover in other videos.
• The pre-upgrade assistant does the homework first. I run it before touching anything so it can review the system, its configuration, and running services, then drops a full report under /root/preupgrade so I know what to expect.
• In place saves real time and money. Rather than rebuilding hardware, resubscribing, and reinstalling applications, I let the tool reboot into a temporary upgrade environment, lay down the RHEL 7 packages, and come back up on a new kernel already running 7.9.

If RHEL 6 is still lurking in your fleet, this is the least painful way I know to get it current.