Upgrading vCloud Director Cell from RHEL 5.6 to RHEL 5.7

Posted by erik on 16 Mar , 2012 in GNU/Linux, VMware | 3 comments

With the release of vCloud Director 1.5.1 last night, the operating system for the vCloud Director Cell now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 (x86_64). If you are running your current cell with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, and you want to upgrade to the most recent release that is supported, here are the steps. Yet, you have to be careful not to upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8, which as been release the 21st February 2012. RHEL 5.8 is not on the official supported list by VMware.

In the following screenshots we will use the yum update tool to make sure we upgrade to RHEL 5.7 only.

The first screenshot shows the current kernel 2.6.18-308.el5 for RHEL 5.6, and the configuration of the yum.conf file that has an explicit exclude=redhat-release-5Server* rule. We also see that we now have the redhat-release-5Server-5.6.0.3.

Current vCD-Cell settings for RHEL 5.6

We will now modify the /etc/yum.conf so that we can download the redhat-release-5Server-5.7.0.3.x86_64.rpm file. We comment out the exclude file, and we install immediately the release file for RHEL 5.7

vCD-Cell upgrading from RHEL 5.6 to RHEL 5.7

Now it’s important to immedialty renable the exclusion of the redhat-release-5Server, so that you will not by accident upgrade to RHEL 5.8

Ensure that yum cannot retrieve RHEL 5.8

Now you can run the yum upgrade to your own pace, and be sure that you are staying on the supported release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the vCloud Director 1.5.1

thornbux

This only ensures that the redhat-release RPM is not upgraded. You will still get RHEL5 update 8 packages installed with a yum update operation. You can query if you have RHEL5 update 8 packages by running rpm -qa|grep el5_8
Your post only describes how you fool vSphere Client to believe it is running on a certain RHEL update version.
I have not found any way to “lock” your RHEL5 installation to a desired RHEL update version. I have also tried yum versionlock as well without any luck.
- thornbux
  
  Sorry about typo, i meant vCloud Director, not vSphere Client.
GeorgeW

Not sure if this is supported because most kernel packages+ drivers etc will still be updated. If you run lsb_release -d , what is the output?

I was looking for something similar in rhel 6.2, and this command did not work for me… I ended up using exclude kernel*, glib* and then I only updated security-related packages by yum -y update –security (requires yum-security first).

thornbux , in order to lock your release you can do it by changing the base channel on the redhat website, but your systems need to have an active add-on subscription called EUS “Extended Update Service” , (around $249 per processor)

Upgrading vCloud Director Cell from RHEL 5.6 to RHEL 5.7

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Meta