With the Foreman Project dropping support for EL7 in Foreman 3.3 (~Summer 2022), it's finally time to tackle that migration to EL8 you have been putting off for a while now. In this session we will present various ways how you can migrate your installation from EL7 to EL8, with the main focus on the in-place upgrade using LEAPP/ELevate.

The Foreman Project is planning to drop support for EL7-based deployments in Foreman 3.3, mostly due to the fact that EL7 is considered "feature complete" and there are no further updates (besides security fixes) planned for it. Contrary to Debian or Fedora, EL-based distributions aren't designed to be upgraded in-place without special tooling. This tooling exists in form of the LEAPP project for RHEL and the ELevate fork by AlmaLinux for AlmaLinux, CentOS, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux. We have developed a plugin for LEAPP that helps with the Foreman-specific parts of the migration, which we would like to present to you. As usual, there were a few challenges during the development, which will hopefully entertain you and maybe even help if you need to write own LEAPP plugins. And last but not least, we will also discuss other approaches you can take for the migration, if you do not want to upgrade in-place.