Completion Report
Project Summary:
The project completed successfully. All Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems in IS that can be transitioned to CentOS Linux have been successfully migrated. The remaining services on Red Hat Linux need to remain running that OS as the software vendors for the applications running on these servers have refused to validate the configuration. This will save the university an estimated £136K to £200K per annum.
| Planned Deliverables (from Project Brief) | Delivered? |
|---|---|
In-house management tools (SpaceWalk) built and deployed | Yes but with caveat that it is not currently being used to manage the CentOS estate. |
| Documented migation paths for each flavour of RHEL5/6/7 actively run | Yes |
| Identification of service support stacks that mandate RHEL | Yes |
| Policy around standard remote repositories to be used | Yes |
| Policy around standard errate application | Yes |
| Servers, minus those on the exception list, migrated from RHEL to CentOS | Yes |
| Kickstart integration | Yes |
| Policy around system grouping & management | No |
| Success Criteria (from Project Brief) | Achieved? | Additional comments |
|---|---|---|
| The delivery of a reliable migration path with only the essential systems denoted on the exception list not migrated by the drop dead date. | Yes | All servers were migrated ahead of schedule. |
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 50 days
Staff Usage Actual: 30 days
Staff Usage Variance: -40%
Other Resource Estimate: 0 days
Other Resource Actual: 0 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
We were able to schedule the transition to CentOS quicker than anticipated by compressing the migrations into existing patch schedules and doubling up the number of patch rounds. We also descoped the setup of the Spacewalk service to save time and effort.
Key Learning Points:
It took some time to get agreement on which systems had to be left on Red Hat and which could be migrated to CentOS. This would indicate we need to schedule longer planning process if we were to do a future project of this type. However, once this was agreed the patching schedule to carry out the migration was quickly developed and we were able to complete ahead of schedule and under budget.
Outstanding issues:
We will still need to licence the remaining Red Hat systems in the new financial year. The number of licences to be costed is still to be finalised and we will not be able to raise a PO until August when the existing contract expires. This is out of scope of this project, however.
As part of the project a Spacewalk management service was developed. This can be used to manage the installation of patches across the estate and schedule restarts. We decided early on to decouple the use of this service from this project to migrate the servers to CentOS. The Spacewalk service is installed but not yet in use and we will wish to revisit this in future.