As I have pointed out before and also in EL7 deprecation it all may look much easier if you only have a foreman installation without katello. (although even there I have a couple of puppet parameters which I pass per host group or host which need to be recreated…)
But with katello, I see a lot of additional configuration until everything is set up. The initial setup includes lots of products and repositories to be set up. For each subscribed host I basically have to assume a unique set of repositories enabled. And as far as I can see I cannot simply point a client to a new katello server and it automatically subscribes to all the products it had and enables/disables all the repositories it has.
So to me, a working migration path is essential. Because otherwise, I really do have to start all other again, going through all the settings for all the hosts and recreate everything.
To me, there seem to be two possible ways:
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backup and restore. Backup all configuration and restore them into a new foreman/katello installation. The synced pulp content doesn’t have to be migrated. I can live with that being downloaded again (even though it’s close to 1 TB by now). Of course, some intelligent migration for the pulp content would be nice (i.e. the new server doing the initial download from the old server or mounting the old pulp partition on the new server to copy the content).
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Extraction of the complete configuration into an ansible playbook to install the new server. That would be the ideal solution to me, because that way I could get into the ansible installation of foreman/katello without starting at scratch.
I think, EL 7 should only be deprecated after the backup/restore process is fully and well tested, so that I can use that to do the migration. No. 2 is far away, if it ever gets there.
Pulp2-3 migration was a major operation for me which took me months until I had s state (with a couple of workaround) to get everything migrated.
Now with katello 4.3 officially out I have to do the puppet module extraction and hope everything will still work after the upgrade. I really do hope that it’s not as difficult as the pulp migration, but because of the problems with the pulp migration and waited with the upgrade from 4.1 as long as possible. I hope it goes smooth but I am worried it may take me again a while to get it properly working again.
If migration is again another pain like the pulp migration, I really would defer any further upgrades until I set up a new server on EL9, because I don’t really don’t want to migrate now from EL7 to EL8 and in two years again from EL8 to EL9. When EL9 is out I would set up a new server on EL9 and start learning how to set up foreman/katello with ansible (which I have never used before).
And I assume many others will do so, too. After all the work and pain the past upgrades have caused you’d rather postpone the updates.
So please, please, give a well working migration plan on how to backup/restore everything before deprecating EL7. And generally, I always think it would be much better, if life time of a product follows the life time of the supported operating system. I wonder what RedHat does with satellite? They have to support satellite until EL7 EOL, don’t they?