If you create a new 14.04 VM and keep it FRESH, then dist-upgrade to 16.04 then again to 18.04 you should limit the amount of issues you may or may not have to deal with. HOWEVER this still doesn’t guarantee that OpenVZ system you are on will still support it.
Maybe they should just take a backup then destroy the current VPS, Reinstall using 16.04, upgrade to 18.04 and restore the mailinabox backup? Would probably save some time and ensure that there are no obvious roadblock situations.
If you are running OpenVZ you cannot upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04 (or from 14.04 to 16.04). We have the same issues with Time4VPS where we run out MIAB server. We also have no timescale for 18.04.
OpenVZ is not a ‘simple’ kernel and creating an OpenVZ image is non-trivial otherwise it would have been done.
I wouldn’t suggest you try the upgrade but if you have, it would be good to know what happened.
Hi @rwillett. I am too with Time4VPS. Did not perform the upgrade yet, and hearing this, I don’t think I will try. Guess there is not good option but to wait.
Some of the software we are using is moving to Ubuntu 18.04. Do you have a timeline for when you will make this available please?
Thanks
Rob
and this is the answer about upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04. Basically don’t do it. You have to reinstall the whole machine which is NOT an upgrade in my book.
Hello Rob,
Here are the answers to your questions:
We are using the latest stable kernel version (2.6.32) for OpenVZ virtualization, so it is not possible to upgrade kernel for OpenVZ servers. However, you are able to update kernel version up to 4.X.X in KVM based servers:
Unfortunately, upgrading is not possible in such a way. You are able to re-install your OS and transfer your data manually.
It is not possible to take a snapshot of your container, we recommend to use RSync to transfer your data and configuration, Here is the tutorial about it:
We are looking to upgrade a number of our servers from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
We have a number of questions about this.
As our machines are held as containers, can we even upgrade them?
Is the upgrade from 14.04 LTS to 16.04LTS as easy as do-release-upgrade? We doubt it but it would be good to know If not what is the advised path for upgrading.
Once we know we can do the upgrade, we will do a test upgrade on a sacrificial server that we will build for the sole purpose of checking what does and doesn’t work. We would want to build this new machine as a test machine, check everything works, take a backup of the machine and check that we can restore it. Then and only then, once we have checked we can restore, will we move onto doing the actual upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 We have read the page on backups but it may take longer for us to do the testing that everything works than overnight or a week. is there an opportunity to take a backup (or snapshot) and restore it when we want, perhaps two weeks later? We cannot guarantee that all the testing will be done in a certain timescale and we need to be able to go back to a certain know position.
If not what is the advised path for upgrading.