ELevate Your Distribution
ELevate enables migration between major versions of RHEL® derivatives. Move between major versions of RHEL-derivatives: from CentOS 6.x to CentOS 7.x, from CentOS 7.x to 8.x version of the RHEL derivative of your choice, or upgrade from 8.x to 9.x within the same derivative.
About
Major Version Upgrades
It wasn't possible--until now. Move between major versions of RHEL-derivatives: from CentOS 6.x to CentOS 7.x, from CentOS 7.x to 8.x version of the RHEL derivative of your choice, or upgrade from 8.x to 9.x within the same derivative. Preserve your applications, your data, and your sanity. Run the most recent version of the OS and software you need.
Package Evolution Service
The beating heart of ELevate is the Package Evolution Service (PES) which allows you to download, customize and even submit new data sets for packages. Users and maintainers can both utilize the PES to help make migrations smooth and easy.
Community-wide Project
ELevate is developed in a distribution agnostic way and is built as a tool for the whole ecosystem, not just AlmaLinux. ELevate supports migrating to/from other distributions and is open for all to contribute to and enhance.
FAQ
What is ELevate?
ELevate is a project aimed to provide the ability to upgrade between major versions of RHEL-based distributions. It combines Red Hat's Leapp framework with a community-created migration metadata library and service.
This looks awesome. How can I contribute?
First join us in the
~migration Mattermost
channel. You can find the tool code
in the AlmaLinux GitHub organization
and you can add/edit/interact with package metadata at https://pes.almalinux.org.
Is this ready for production?
ELevate has been used to migrate production environments across industries and across the world, but we still advise caution. Every environment is different and unique based on applications and configurations.
To avoid any surprises, we highly recommend that you test upgrades scenarios in a virtual machine or sandbox before running a upgrades in production.
What operating systems does ELevate support?
Currently, ELevate project supports the following upgrade and migration directions:
* - migration to CentOS Stream 9 is currently in development and will be available later.
** - migration to Oracle Linux 9 is available with the Oracle Leapp utility and will not be supported by ELevate project.
Note: If you use cPanel, we recommend using the cPanel ELevate fork.
* - migration to CentOS Stream 9 is currently in development and will be available later.** - migration to Oracle Linux 9 is available with the Oracle Leapp utility and will not be supported by ELevate project.
Note: If you use cPanel, we recommend using the cPanel ELevate fork.
Will migration be "in-place"?
Yes. All your data, applications and settings will be kept.
Is this live or does it require a reboot?
Migrations will require your system to reboot twice.
What does the Package Evolution Service (PES) do?
The Package Evolution Service stores package migration metadata. Metadata answers questions about how packages evolve between major distribution releases. PES supports several classes of rules for packages such as added, removed, renamed, split, merged, and so on. The service also allows everyone to improve the data by adding new actions or even create a custom dataset for packages from third-party or private repositories.
Red Hat offers a data set which is non-freely licensed. Are you using this same data set?
No. We respect Red Hat’s work and our initial data set was provided by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation with contributions from Oracle.
What license is your metadata under?
The metadata is provided under an Apache License.
Why are you supporting migration to other distributions?
Our contributors have been part of the RHEL ecosystem for a very long time, and we recognized that the CentOS ecosystem is a very large and diverse community. We've developed this project in good faith in the hope that everyone in the community can use and contribute to, no matter which distro you prefer. That's the open source way.