Complete Guide to Solidifying a CentOS Migration 2024

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Complete Guide to Solidifying a CentOS Migration [2025]

Complete Guide to Solidifying a CentOS Migration [2025]

CentOS Migration – When the platform you’ve trusted for your Linux distribution is headed toward the end of its life, you’ve got to make plans to migrate your system to another operating system. Deciding on your new operating system affects how you prepare for the CentOS 8 end-of-life.

Understand that if your organization is not ready to migrate in response to the end-of-life announcement, there are options to help you postpone the process and complete your migration strategy on your own timeline.

Evaluate the benefits of a timely migration

Before moving your business to a new platform, evaluating how the migration will benefit your operation is worthwhile. Making a significant change like this can affect your business’s security, but it could also improve your company’s tech performance.

Determine time your in-house developers will need

Moving away from CentOS 8 could be a costly undertaking, especially for your in-house development team’s person-hours. Migrations can be complicated procedures that often involve unexpected problems. You’ll need to determine how many person-hours your developers will need to ensure that your new system runs safely and smoothly.

Remember that you’re still paying your developers for their time, but that time is not being spent making new things. When developers work through migration issues, they aren’t working with customers and optimizing pre-existing tools. You may want to consider bringing in outside help if the human downtime isn’t in the cards for your business development.

Have a team that can work through migration issues

Your in-house developers might be knowledgeable about software development, but IT migration issues might not be their forte. Ask your team about their comfort level with the end-of-life migration. If your developers aren’t, you might have to find a team to help with the migration process. You might have to hire through a freelance website or find local temporary workers.

Consider planning and logistics

When your company is migrating, the process can take away precious time from other focus areas. You will have to plan for outage time, and if you get too close to the end-of-life moment, you could have problems with your entire platform and operating system.

What will your team do when the system is down? How will you accommodate your customers and vendors? How long do you anticipate the migration to shut down your operations?

Figure out what migration options you have

CentOS Migration – Before you decide how to handle the CentOS 8 end-of-life problems, you’ve got to determine what operating system will meet your needs. You can choose from open-source options or commercial options.

Open-source options include Linux solutions like Rocky Linux and Navy Linux. Even though CentOS 8 is ending, CentOS 7 will still be available through June 2024. Going backward to CentOS 7 only postpones the inevitable.

Other open-source options include Upstream RHEL for rolling releases through a Red Hat distributor. Your company could also investigate the possibilities of OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and different ecosystems. These could be challenging, primarily if you’ve relied on Linux for years.

Commercial options include RHEL, which will keep your operating system in the same ecosystem. Unfortunately, the price tag might be cost-prohibitive for companies that want to minimize operating-system expenditures. Other commercial options include Ubuntu Enterprise and Amazon Linux.

The safest choice for migrating from an open-source Linux system is to another Linux system. However, any migration could be fraught with challenges.

Final word

CentOS Migration – Before undertaking an end-of-life plan to recover from the impending doom of CentOS 8, businesses need to make several decisions. These decisions can help prevent catastrophes related to data security, person-hours, and losing valuable time. Thoughtful planning can prevent unexpected problems from shutting down your business.

Setting a CentOS Migration Strategy

Lance Dillon

With CentOS 7 end of life fast approaching, many organizations are considering their alternative support and/or CentOS migration options. The good news for those who are ready to migrate? There are a host of viable options available. Unfortunately, having so many choices can make choosing the right CentOS migration path difficult.

In this blog, we discuss CentOS migration considerations, and dive in on the viable paths organizations can follow to migrate their soon-to-be-EOL CentOS 7 deployments.

Table of Contents

  1. Are You Ready to Migrate From CentOS?
  2. Potential CentOS Migration Paths
  3. Final Thoughts

Are You Ready to Migrate From CentOS?

Migrating to a new operating system can be a challenge, and that challenge only compounds with the complexity of a given system. But even setting aside that complexity, organizations have plenty of factors to consider before making a migration.

Establishing Benefit – The first and most important part of setting a CentOS migration strategy is determining the benefits of that migration. Will it save development time? Will it improve performance? Will it reduce security risk? Those benefits should be weighed against the expected expenditure for making that migration, and compared against the cost of using a third party for extended long term support in end of life.

Developer Time and Resources – Migrations take time. Depending on the complexity of the system, and the unforeseen obstacles experienced in the migration and accompanying integrations, the availability of requisite developer hours needed to migrate to a new OS can quickly become an impediment. Ensuring your development team has the bandwidth for a migration is key. It’s also important to note that time spent on the migration is time not spent on developing new features, improving customer experience, or otherwise optimizing your systems.

Internal Expertise – Establishing the developer time needed is important, but it’s also important to keep in mind the expertise of the team performing that migration. Do they have the knowledge needed to solve problems as they arise? Or do you need a third party to help iron out the details?

Planning and Logistics – Another impact area for these migrations is in the planning and logistics. Even the act of planning a migration can take time and resources away from other focus areas. It’s also important to consider the potential length of the migration. Will your migration occur before EOL? During EOL? If so, how will your team account for exposure to vulnerabilities while you’re still on CentOS?

There are plenty of other considerations in planning a CentOS migration, but these high-level considerations are a good starting point for most organizations.

Need More Time on CentOS? Get Long-Term Support

For organizations that have recently migrated to CentOS 7, making another migration so soon may not be in the cards. For those teams, or for those who need more time to plan their CentOS migration, long-term support (LTS) offers a way to keep secure and supported until they’re able to migrate.

Explore CentOS LTS

Potential CentOS Migration Paths

There are plenty of viable CentOS migration paths. Each path carries its own benefits and unique challenges for migration. In the following sections, we highlight a few of those migration paths — including considerations for those migrations. To keep things simple, we will focus on migrations from the last community supported version of CentOS, CentOS 7.

CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux Migration

If you’re planning a CentOS to Rocky Linux migration, keep in mind that there is no Rocky Linux 7; that distribution started at 8. So this path is available, but entails upgrading to CentOS 8 first. There is a project called ELevate by AlmaLinux that covers upgrading from CentOS to Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8 (or 9).

The Rocky Linux path covers migration from several distributions, such as RHEL, Oracle Linux, AlmaLinux, and CentOS. The migration is quick and easy, consisting of a shell script to run. It swaps out a few rpms, changes repos, then upgrades packages to bring the system up to the latest version. After rebooting, choose the Rocky Linux kernel and you’re now operating on a Rocky Linux 8 system.

These scripts will generally skip third party packages that aren’t part of the original distribution, but if all packages were part of the original system, it should work flawlessly.

CentOS 7 to CentOS Stream 9 Migration

Migrating from CentOS 7 to CentOS Stream is a valid migration path if you still want the latest distribution of CentOS. CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL, but downstream of Fedora. However, for this migration, you will again need to migrate first from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 (using ELevate as described above) since CentOS Stream started after EL 8. Once on CentOS 8, the migration itself involves only a couple of commands, and then a distro sync to update the system. At this point you are now on CentOS Stream, and will get regular, rolling updates.

CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux Migration

The AlmaLinux migration is nearly identical to the process for converting to Rocky Linux. You download a script, run it, and it switches and updates packages on the system. After rebooting, you choose the AlmaLinux kernel (which should be the default), and you are running AlmaLinux 8 (or 9). For more details, read this blog on how to plan a CentOS to AlmaLinux migration.

CentOS 7 to RHEL Migration

CentOS 7 to RHEL migration is possible, but has more steps. This is because RHEL uses a subscription manager and SSL certs to verify entitlements, and is not strictly a Yum repo. This means you must have a valid entitlement. While there is a conversion script provided by RHEL that you can install, you must provide information to the script to verify and get access to RHEL repo (such as activation ID or username and password).

Featured Video: CentOS Migration Tips

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Other CentOS Migration Paths

There is, of course, the possibility of migrating to other entirely different types of systems, such as SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora, but none of those are directly compatible and would require a total rebuild. There are a few other distributions that are more closely aligned with CentOS, like VzLinux, which is used as a hypervisor style system for OpenVZ, which is more similar to containers than virtual machines.

Final Thoughts

CentOS migrations can be a challenge for any organization. Luckily, there are plenty of viable migration paths available. Whether that’s staying in the spirit of CentOS with Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux, moving to a rolling release distribution like CentOS Stream, or something a little different, companies should be able to find an option that matches their needs.

Additional Resources

  • Blog – How to Plan a Successful Linux Migration
  • Datasheet: CentOS Long-Term and Technical Support
  • White Paper: Decision Maker’s Guide to Enterprise Linux
  • Guide – CentOS Guide for Enterprise
  • Webinar – Start Planning for CentOS 7 EOL
  • Blog – Rocky Linux vs. AlmaLinux
  • Blog – The Long-Term Outlook for CentOS 7 Support
  • Blog – Finding the Best Linux Distro for Your Organization
  • Blog – What’s Next for CentOS Stream

https://www.computertechreviews.com/solidifying-a-centos-migration/

https://www.openlogic.com/blog/setting-centos-migration-strategy