[gpfsug-discuss] GPFS 5 and supported rhel OS

Skylar Thompson skylar2 at uw.edu
Thu Feb 20 15:19:09 GMT 2020


On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 11:23:52AM +0000, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:
> On 20/02/2020 10:41, Simon Thompson wrote:
> > Well, if you were buying some form of extended Life Support for
> > Scale, then you might also be expecting to buy extended life for
> > RedHat. RHEL6 has extended life support until June 2024. Sure its an
> > add on subscription cost, but some people might be prepared to do
> > that over OS upgrades.
> 
> I would recommend anyone going down that to route to take a *very* close 
> look at what you get for the extended support. Not all of the OS is 
> supported, with large chunks being moved to unsupported even if you pay 
> for the extended support.
> 
> Consequently extended support is not suitable for HPC usage in my view, 
> so start planning the upgrade now. It's not like you haven't had 10 
> years notice.
> 
> If your GPFS is just a storage thing serving out on protocol nodes, 
> upgrade one node at a time to RHEL7 and then repeat upgrading to GPFS 5. 
> It's a relatively easy invisible to the users upgrade.

I agree, we're having increasing difficulty running CentOS 6, not because
of the lack of support from IBM/RedHat, but because the software our
customers want to run has started depending on OS features that simply
don't exist in CentOS 6. In particular, modern gcc and glibc, and
containers are all features that many of our customers are expecting that
we provide. The newer kernel available in CentOS 7 (and now 8) supports
large numbers of CPUs and large amounts of memory far better than the
ancient CentOS 6 kernel as well.

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar2 at u.washington.edu)
-- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator
-- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354
-- University of Washington School of Medicine



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