Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 Released

For those running on RHEL6, Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RHEL-6.9-Released

[torsionbar28]

I don't see any hardware enablement updates in the release notes for AMD fam 17h. So if you're a RHEL shop, as we are, and you buy a new AMD Zen server later this year, looks like RHEL 7 is the only option.

[Delgarde]

I don't see any hardware enablement updates in the release notes for AMD fam 17h. So if you're a RHEL shop, as we are, and you buy a new AMD Zen server later this year, looks like RHEL 7 is the only option.

Is there a reason you'd buy new hardware, but stick with an older OS? Generally the clients I work with treat new hardware as their opportunity to upgrade *everything*, since with the old hardware still in production, they have the luxury of time to do all the things that would take major outages otherwise...

[torsionbar28]

Is there a reason you'd buy new hardware, but stick with an older OS? Generally the clients I work with treat new hardware as their opportunity to upgrade *everything*, since with the old hardware still in production, they have the luxury of time to do all the things that would take major outages otherwise...

Yes, the level of effort required to build and test the custom application stack on a new OS. Virtualization has made it so easy to move to new hardware - live migrate running VM's from old servers to new servers with no downtime and minimal effort. Although with virtualization, maybe only the hypervisor needs to support the physical CPU architecture, and it doesn't matter so much for the VM's? I don't know.

[speculatrix]

At last, I can stop holding my breath.

/sarcasm

[torsionbar28]

At last, I can stop holding my breath.

/sarcasm

^ Specutroll.

[speculatrix]

^ Specutroll.

thanks, I do my best.

[Delgarde]

Yes, the level of effort required to build and test the custom application stack on a new OS. Virtualization has made it so easy to move to new hardware - live migrate running VM's from old servers to new servers with no downtime and minimal effort. Although with virtualization, maybe only the hypervisor needs to support the physical CPU architecture, and it doesn't matter so much for the VM's? I don't know.

And that's exactly why the clients I deal with try to do everything at once. Let's say they're doing major hardware replacement every four years - that means that every four years, they find themselves with spare hardware because the new machines aren't being used yet. So this is a good time to upgrade all the accompanying software - install a more recent OS version on the new hardware, install new versions of their database, their web server, all the applications that will be running on that hardware.

Because yes, there's a lot of effort in testing all those upgrades and getting the problems resolved. But the alternative is staying on old and unsupported software versions indefinitely, because those four-yearly hardware replacements are their one chance of getting all that work done without major outages. They get everything working on the new hardware, sync the databases one last time, then reconfigure the load balancer to point at the new machines instead of the old.