Migrating Foreman/Katello to New Server

Support
1

Hi, all!

I am preparing to migrate my Foreman and Katello instance to a VM in Azure and I’m looking for just a little guidance on how I can best do this.

I am currently running Foreman 2.2/Katello 3.17. These of course are old, unsupported versions and I’d like to get to the highest stable versions possible, which I believe is Foreman 3.2/Katello 4.4 at the time of this writing.

Therefor my question is how do I go about this? I’m looking at the Foreman Maintain documentation now regarding backing up the data and restoring it. I figure I could perform the backup on my old server and then simply restore it on the new system using foreman-maintain?

With that, my next question is can I do a backup of a legacy system (Foreman 2.2/Katello 3.17) and restore that on a freshly installed stable version (Foreman 3.2/Katello 4.4)? Or do I need to install the legacy version on the new server, restore the backup and then upgrade from there?

I would simply upgrade the original server to the target version before backing up, however it seems to be in a state which upgrading breaks the system. Unfortunately I cannot leave the system in a broken state for too long to troubleshoot, as it is a heavily used production system.

Anyways, that is where I’m at. Any assistance on the above would be greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone has any general tips on doing this migration, I’d love to hear them!

Thank you :slight_smile:

2

Ohai,

officially, we do not support restoring on a “wrong” version (backup on 2.2, restore on 3.2 etc), even tho it sometimes might work (and sometimes eat a kitten, you know the drill).

If the upgrade on the current system “breaks” it, so it will on the restored system (regardless whether you restore to 2.2 or 3.2).

I am afraid but your best options are either:

  • stand up a completely new system and gradually migrate clients there
  • upgrade the current one, fix all issues, migrate the then current backup over
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