Upgrade of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to RHEL 6

brittocj

Hello,

Our servers are upto date with RHEL 5.10, 2.6.18-371 kernel.

What will happen at server with next yum update?

Will it upgrade to RHEL 6, or only kernel and other packages will be upgraded to next version?

What should be the recommended way forward with RHEL 5.10 with 2.6.18-371 kernel servers?

We are using Satellite server to freeze channels every quarter and using that channel to update / patch the servers using yum update command.

Thanks in advance.

britto

byrnejb

Yum will not upgrade your OS from 5.x to 6.y; at least not without a lot of effort on your part and certainly not automatically. Typically a move from RHELx to RHELx+1 requires a re-install. In those very few cases where it is not actually required then a re-install is still recommended.

Basically, you backup your user data from RHEL5 and move it to a new host running RHEL6 (or RHEL7 for that matter). You then recycle the existing host depending on the hardware's residual value by either installing a fresh copy of RHEL6 onto it or sending it to the graveyard.