[SOLVED] Upgrade to a specific version (e.g. 6.4 -> 7.0)

[gjan]

Dear all

I had initially planned to upgrade my small cluster vom version 6.4 to 7.1 this month. I read the upgrade documentation and the related documents. Seems not too complicated. As a precaution I also came to check the forums and to my dismay found many threads with issues with 7.1 and especially with the newer kernel. Now I am wondering if I should hold off upgrading to 7.1 until the next minor release or if these posts are mostly edge cases and the majority of users is fine with 7.1?

Alternatively, I could see myself migrating from 6.4 to 7.0, a version I have mostly heard very positive feedback on. But is it possible to also upgrade to a previous minor version instead of the most recent? Has anyone experience with this?

Cheers
Gunnar

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi,

As a precaution I also came to check the forums and to my dismay found many threads with issues with 7.1 and especially with the newer kernel

Most of which got fixed hours to only a few days after being reported, like the recent issue with the 5.13 kernel was resolved in two working days. Also note that:

1. You can always install older or newer opt-in kernels and boot them if a specific kernel version causes trouble on your specific system
2. Proxmox VE 7.0 also got reported some issues and problems, as had 6.4, 6.3, and so on. We have many hundreds of thousands of servers pulling updates from our repos daily, those include servers using CPUs released in 2008 up to bleeding edge stuff, with that wide variety on hardware some issues are inevitable - there's just no way to test millions of HW configurations with the thousands of possible software combinations
3. Almost no issue affected the enterprise repository, which is more conservative on getting upgrades. So, if you're concerned about system stability and/or run a production system we recommend buying an enterprise subscription.

But is it possible to also upgrade to a previous minor version instead of the most recent?

No, Proxmox VE uses a rolling release model, with the point releases being merely snapshots of a repo state on day X, so that we can provide an always recent ISO and have a better metric to talk about when a feature got added or some bugs got resolved.
While you can tell the package management system to pull in a specific version, you need to do that for all relevant packages and you have to get it exactly right, and if you then run into trouble you may just get told to upgrade to the latest available updates as the issue may be fixed there already.

 

[gjan]

Thomas, thanks for the quick reply!
Your answer has reminded me how Proxmox VE is released. I had forgotten about that. Hopefully this your post will help others stumbling upon it as well. I'll mark this as solved.

I had noticed that the issues have mostly been resolved quickly and reports on servers that run smoothly rarely turn up in forums and mailing list.