Do you need to do a new install of CentOS if changing hard ware?

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Mopower

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I have CentOS installed on a Dell Power Edge 1950. The 1950 has died. I am replacing it with a Power Edge R410. Both use sata 7.2k hard drives. Can I take the hard drive out of the 1950 and put in the R410 and have it work properly? Or do I need to do a new install on the new server?
 
Well it's always preferred to reinstall an OS or taking a hard drive and just switching it out. For one thing you will need the drivers for the new server. I'm not familiar with CentOS though
 
I'd just do a reinstall. It *should* work, but then you'd never really know if there's some random hardware issue that won't crop up later. Introducing variables in a business environment is bad juju.

Reinstall.
 
Considering they have different RAID controllers I would not do this just based on that fact.
 
It's hit and miss. My experience has normally been that yes, I need to do a reinstall, especially if the hard drive controller changes.
 
Hm, my experience has been generally that it mostly works. Your ethernet interfaces might get renumbered or something but outside of that you should be golden.
 
I wouldn't bother with a reinstall. Unlike Windows, Linux works quite well when changing hardware. I move hard drives with Linux installs between different motherboards/systems all the time. Ethernet ports will probably be renumbered and if you switch from Nvidia->AMD, you might have to install the drivers but other than that it will just work. Obviously there is an exception if you want to switch architectures. x64 will not boot on a x86 platform and going the other way, you would probably want to move to a x64 based install.
 
reference for CentOS 5.x I have no exact idea about version 6.x
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CreateNewInitrd

I recommend the following test procedure, Since you say Dell,
1. RH Hardware compatibility for Dell R410 RHEL version 4.8+/5.3+/6
2. What version of CentOS on 1950???
3. Use clonezilla to clone the entire old server disk/s to temporary SATA disks. Use the temporary disk/s for testing. In case there is a weird problem, original still with you.
4. Start temporary SATA disks on new server R410. See what happen???
5. If needed, you may need to update the initrd image as provided in the reference above
6. The most likely problem scenario is you are using different hardware RAID controller or HBA between old and new servers. RH notes S100 and S300 controllers may have issue. This is relevant on R410 itself.
 
Thanks for all the replies.

It's Cent 5.7.

The R410 has a E5620 and 8 gb of ram. So I take it I need to do a re-install to be able to use the x64 features such as more ram or is that only a windows thing? I'm not very fluent in doing Linux installs. This is the only box we have that runs Linux and unfortunately I only need to deal with it once every few years when problems like this crop up. The 1950 had a Xenon and 4 gb or ram. Not sure what model of Xenon. The R410 has the onboard SATA controller with no raid. I can't remember if the 1950 has raid or not. I might try the above with imaging the drive and seeing if it boots. Or just putting the old drive in and seeing if it boots. Isn't really going to lose much if I have to do a new install on the new drive the R410 comes with. All the vital information is FTP'd to another PC for backup. It's just going to be a PITA getting everything configured again for what it's used for.
 
Mopower said:
Thanks for all the replies.

It's Cent 5.7.

The R410 has a E5620 and 8 gb of ram. So I take it I need to do a re-install to be able to use the x64 features such as more ram or is that only a windows thing? I'm not very fluent in doing Linux installs. This is the only box we have that runs Linux and unfortunately I only need to deal with it once every few years when problems like this crop up. The 1950 had a Xenon and 4 gb or ram. Not sure what model of Xenon. The R410 has the onboard SATA controller with no raid. I can't remember if the 1950 has raid or not. I might try the above with imaging the drive and seeing if it boots. Or just putting the old drive in and seeing if it boots. Isn't really going to lose much if I have to do a new install on the new drive the R410 comes with. All the vital information is FTP'd to another PC for backup. It's just going to be a PITA getting everything configured again for what it's used for.
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If you are not comfortable with administration of the box, then I absolutely recommend a wipe and reload. You don't want to be dealing with any strangeness that may crop up from doing a hardware swap.

Reload, and take the opportunity to document how to configure a fresh server for future use.
 
Well installing Cent was a snap. Re installing the software to manage all my dslams went disastrously as usual. Everything I have to do is such a pain in the ass. I get to be on a 4 hour phone call with tech support once again. Would have been a lot easier to use the old hard drive but that's operating systems I guess. ;)
 
Mopower said:
Well installing Cent was a snap. Re installing the software to manage all my dslams went disastrously as usual. Everything I have to do is such a pain in the ass. I get to be on a 4 hour phone call with tech support once again. Would have been a lot easier to use the old hard drive but that's operating systems I guess. ;)
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The way to avoid this is to make the server a vm guest, if you can. That way you can do whatever you need to to the hardware underneath without impacting the OS enough to necessitate a reinstall.

That's if you can of course. Do the dslams communicate with the server over ethernet? Or are they physically plugged in to the server?
 
XOR != OR said:
The way to avoid this is to make the server a vm guest, if you can. That way you can do whatever you need to to the hardware underneath without impacting the OS enough to necessitate a reinstall.

That's if you can of course. Do the dslams communicate with the server over ethernet? Or are they physically plugged in to the server?
Click to expand...

The dslams are connected over ethernet. Actually it's not going to be so bad. I can take the old hard drive with the database backups and install it in the new server and tech support can pull the files and put them in the new install of the management software.

I would like to do VM's but I'm not familiar with how to do it and for right now this will work until we need to change hardware again. Hopefully not for a few years.
 
Mopower said:
The dslams are connected over ethernet. Actually it's not going to be so bad. I can take the old hard drive with the database backups and install it in the new server and tech support can pull the files and put them in the new install of the management software.

I would like to do VM's but I'm not familiar with how to do it and for right now this will work until we need to change hardware again. Hopefully not for a few years.
Click to expand...
Well, when you next upgrade, I recommend pursuing hardware that is esx certified. Then, you can load up esxi 5 ( free with restrictions ), put your server in there. Bang, it's isolated from most hardware changes ( there are some cpu oddities to be careful of, but nothing horrible ).

It's still suseptible from all the normal OS issues that might plague it though, so you still need your backups, but it's a nice management tool none the less. I'm pushing all of my servers that direction.
 
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