Service providers of operating systems stop providing technical support for outdated operating systems due to several reasons, such as end of life (EOL), end of third-party support, or evolution of open source projects. For example, CentOS has announced the EOL for CentOS Linux of versions such as CentOS 7 and CentOS 8, and Windows has announced the EOL for Windows Server of versions such as Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012. An operating system that reaches its EOL faces more severe security vulnerability threats. If the operating system of your ECS instance meets the migration requirements, you can seamlessly migrate the operating system to another operating system by using Server Migration Center (SMC) for future maintenance and technical support. This topic describes the benefits, scenarios, and limits of the operating system migration feature.
For more information about the maintenance cycle of operating systems, see Maintenance support for operating systems.
Benefits
Ease of use
The migration operations are performed on a GUI. You can view the migration progress and logs in the SMC console.
Strong reliability
Snapshots are automatically created without manual intervention.
High security
The original system disk is released and replaced by a new system disk. You do not need to worry about data loss because the new system disk contains all the data in the original system disk.
Scenarios
You need future maintenance and technical support when the lifecycle of your operating system ends.
Some versions of CentOS and Windows have been officially discontinued. If you need future maintenance and technical support for such an operating system, you must migrate or upgrade the operating system.
You want to optimize the operating system architecture.
The current operating system cannot meet your business requirements. You want to optimize the operating system architecture to improve system reliability and performance. For example, the current operating system may be incompatible with specific software, hardware, or other devices.
Migration process
The following figure shows the process of migrating CentOS 7 that runs on an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance to Alibaba Cloud Linux 3.
Usage notes
The operating system to be migrated must run on an ECS instance within the current Alibaba Cloud account.
Only migration schemes described in the following tables are supported.
Linux
The following table describes the x86- or ARM64-based operating systems that can be migrated by using SMC and the corresponding operating systems to which they can be migrated.
Operating system architecture
Source operating system
Destination operating system
X86
CentOS 7
AnolisOS 7
AnolisOS 8
Red Hat 7
ImportantOnly a CentOS 7.9 operating system can be migrated to Red Hat 7.
Alibaba Cloud Linux 2
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3
CentOS 8
AnolisOS 8
Red Hat 8
ImportantOnly a CentOS 8.5 operating system can be migrated to Red Hat 8.
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3
Red Hat 7
ImportantOnly Red Hat 7.9 is supported.
Red Hat 8
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3
Alibaba Cloud Linux 2
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3
ARM64
CentOS 7
AnolisOS 7
AnolisOS 8
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3
CentOS 8
AnolisOS 8
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3
Windows
The following table describes the x86-based operating systems that can be migrated by using SMC and the operating systems that can serve as migration destinations.
Operating system architecture
Source operating system
Destination operating system
X86
Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English)
ImportantThe language of the destination operating system must be the same as that of the source operating system.
Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2016 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2019 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English)
ImportantThe language of the destination operating system must be the same as that of the source operating system.
Windows Server 2016 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2016 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English)
Windows Server 2019 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English)
ImportantThe language of the destination operating system must be the same as that of the source operating system.
For more information about the limits on operating system migration, see the following topics:
References
For more information about how to migrate or upgrade CentOS or Windows operating systems, see the following topics: