Overview

Background

The University widely uses the RedHat Enterprise Operating System on all managed Linux installations. This is licensed under and academic licensing deal per seat at a very agressive discount. The historical licensing deal excludes us from leveraging support from RedHat and only gains us access to the Operating System and a set of management tools.

RedHat have changed the academic license agreement and we can no longer continue to use the existing licenses unless they are directly used by Students in Labs, any usage connected to running the business of the university now falls under a new category. The new license cost is greater than 900% uplift. This would take our annual cost up to around £200,000 and continue to grow per annum as we grow. Given we have never used support under our old license agreement this is an significant cost for what is essentially some management tools that are availabile open source.

Therefore we shall be migrating all RedHat Servers which do not have an external vendor mandating the RedHat OS to CentOS. CentOS is an open source community driven clone of the RedHat Enterprise OS, and is now under the umbrella of RedHat as in January 2014 CentOS announced the official joining with RedHat while staying independent from RHEL under a new CentOS governing board.

Scope

To migrate all managed servers, except those explictily defined by vendor support to be on RHEL, to CentOS before our current license agreement expires in August 2016.

Objectives

To reduce the recurrent cost upon the University whilst maintaining a stable and reliable server environment.

Deliverables

• In-House management tools (SpaceWalk) built and deployed [Mandatory]
• documented migation paths for each flavour of RHEL5/6/7 actively run [Mandatory]
• Identification of service support stacks that mandate RHEL [Mandatory]
• policy around standard remote repositories to be used [Mandatory]
• policy around standard errate application [Mandatory]
• Servers, minus those on the exception list, migrated from RHEL to CentOS [Mandatory]
• kickstart integration [Highly Desirable] 
• policy around system grouping & management [Highly Desirable]  

Benefits

• Ensure we continue to be on a stable and secure platform.
• That we provide the least intrusive mechanism to migrate between OS releases - with CentOS being a clone of RHEL
• That we do not fall into compliance issues and break our license agreement
• Save ~£200,000 per annum in license costs

Success Criteria

The delivery of a reliable migration path with only the essential systems denoted on the exception list not migrated by the drop dead date.