Chapter 1. Planning an upgrade An in-place upgrade is the recommended way to upgrade your system to a later major version of RHEL. To ensure that you are aware of all major changes between RHEL 6 and RHEL 7, consult the Migration Planning Guide before beginning the in-place upgrade process. You can also verify whether your system can be upgraded by running the Preupgrade Assistant . The Preupgrade Assistant assesses your system for potential problems that could interfere or inhibit the upgrade before any changes are made to your system. See also Known Issues . Note Once you perform an in-place upgrade on your system, it is possible to get the working system back in limited configurations of the system by using the Red Hat Upgrade Tool integrated rollback capability or by using suitable custom backup and recovery solution, for example, by using the Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) utility. For more information, see Rolling back the upgrade . This RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 upgrade procedure is available if your RHEL system meets the following criteria: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10: Your system must have the latest RHEL 6.10 packages installed. Note that for RHEL 6.10, only the Extended Life Phase (ELP) support is available. Architecture and variant: Only the indicated combinations of architecture and variant from the following matrix can be upgraded: Product Variant Intel 64-bit architecture IBM POWER, big endian IBM Z 64-bit architecture Intel 32-bit architecture Server Edition Available Available Available Not available HPC Compute Node Available N/A N/A Not available Desktop Edition Not Available N/A N/A Not available Workstation Edition Not available N/A N/A Not available Server running CloudForms software Not available N/A N/A N/A Server running Satellite software Not available. To upgrade Satellite environments from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7, see the Red Hat Satellite Installation Guide . N/A N/A N/A Note Upgrades of 64-bit IBM Z systems are allowed unless Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) with Linux Disk Layout (LDL) is used. Supported packages: The in-place upgrade is available for the following packages: Packages installed from the base repository, for example, the rhel-6-server-rpms if the system is on the RHEL 6 Server for the Intel architecture. The Preupgrade Assistant, Red Hat Upgrade Tool, and any other packages that are required for the upgrade. Note It is recommended to perform the upgrade with a minimum number of packages installed. File systems: File systems formats are intact. As a result, file systems have the same limitations as when they were originally created. Desktop: System upgrades with GNOME and KDE installs are not allowed. For more information, see Upgrading from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 on Gnome Desktop Environment failed . Virtualization: Upgrades with KVM or VMware virtualization are available. Upgrades of RHEL on Microsoft Hyper-V are not allowed. High Availability: Upgrades of systems using the High Availability add-on are not allowed. Public Clouds: The in-place upgrade is not allowed for on-demand instances on Public Clouds. Third-party packages: The in-place upgrade is not allowed on systems using third-party packages, especially packages with third-party drivers that are needed for booting. The /usr directory: The in-place upgrade is not allowed on systems where the /usr directory is on a separate partition. For more information, see Why does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to 7 in-place upgrade fail if /usr is on separate partition? .

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