31 Jul 2023

Upgrades and Operating Systems (OSes)

We’ve been drumming on the fact that it is time to upgrade from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0 and the amount of meetings we have fielded in this respect in recent times shows that people are taking this seriously, and do want to migrate (it may not necessarily be straightforward, but it is necessary). We also did a webinar recently and there is a video recording too. And we are running a one-day training on this matter.

But one thing that is worth noting is that usually people aren’t just upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0, they are also upgrading their base operating system (baseOS/OS). Many we have spoken to are coming from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and/or CentOS 7. Many have plans to upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, but some have brought on concerns about what is going on with Red Hat and the CentOS project, plus all the downstreams from there.

This makes it harder for us, who are making software for multiple Linux distributions.

When it comes to Galera Cluster for MySQL 8.0, we currently support:

  • Debian 10 (“Buster”)
  • Debian 11 (“Bullseye”)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8 and 9
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (“Bionic” Beaver)
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (“Focal” Fossa)
  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (“Jammy” Jellyfish)

You’ll note that from the above, we do not officially support CentOS Stream 8 or 9. Nor do we support AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux. We tend to say that we do, but it isn’t necessarily supported. We tend to also test on Amazon Linux, but not officially build nor support it – it is after all loosely based on Fedora Linux (AL2023 is a mix of Fedora 34/35/36, and some of it is close to CentOS Stream 9).

We have a similar thought process on what is supported from an OS standpoint in Galera Manager:

  • CentOS 7
  • Debian 10
  • Debian 11
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

While we can install on AL2023 for example, none of this is supported, and you occasionally do get a message stating as much (which you can see drives up the support ticket count).

All this comes down to: what do we support when it comes to upgrades? We know that Oracle and SUSE are trying to get migrations from CentOS over. We also know that there are plans for AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux to be supported. And we also see the need for Amazon Linux support. But we can’t be testing and supporting all of them, with varying differences. A good example is that we’ve recently even dropped support for OpenSUSE and you don’t find a MySQL 8 for FreeBSD, either, do you? And we do have production customers on FreeBSD with MySQL 5.7 and Galera Cluster.

So if you’re upgrading, are you sticking with the various “free” operating systems or do you have other plans? Are you moving from CentOS 7 to Ubuntu 22.04? Tell us by contacting us or sending us an e-mail. This will also help drive the OS choices for training going forward, as it is not tenable to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or CentOS 7 for training exercises going forward.