3 Upgrading the system #
SUSE offers a command-line tool to upgrade a running system to a new version. The tool provides support for a “rollback” to an older release. This chapter explains how to upgrade your system step by step.
SUSE releases a new version of SLE Micro at regular intervals. To make it easy for customers to migrate to a new minor version and minimize downtime, SUSE supports migrating online while the system is running.
SLE Micro uses transactional updates to upgrade from one version to the next. This has the following advantages:
Canceling is possible until you reboot your system.
Simple recovery if there is an error.
Possible “rollback” via system tools—no backup or restore needed.
Use of all active repositories.
3.1 Upgrading to a new release #
When you perform an upgrade from previous releases, the default network
framework remains the same. Since SLE Micro 5.3, the default networking
service is NetworkManager. A new installation of SLE Micro is recommended, but if needed, you can switch from wicked to NetworkManager as
described in Procedure 6.1, “Switching from wicked to NetworkManager”. However, automated
migration from wicked to NetworkManager or the conversion of the
wicked configuration is not supported. SUSE also
cannot guarantee full feature parity when switching to NetworkManager.
If your system is registered with the SUSE Customer Center, make sure to have an Internet connection during the following procedure:
The upgrade procedure is performed by calling the
transactional-update:transactional-update migration
A new snapshot is created.
Current repositories are refreshed.
A list of available migration targets is displayed. Enter a number.
A list of packages to be installed or updated is displayed. Press
yto continue with the upgrade procedure.To complete the upgrade, reboot your system and boot into the target version.
If your system is not registered, proceed as follows:
Change the URL of the update repositories to point to the 5.5.
Run the following command:
#transactional-update dup
3.1.1 Extensions during upgrade #
The SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching and SUSE Package Hub might get updated during the upgrade procedure. If you upgrade from an odd release number to the next even one, the extensions retain the same version. For example, when upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4, the extension versions do not change. Otherwise, the extension versions change.
3.2 Reverting the migration process #
If a new release does not work for you, SLE Micro supports reverting the
system to the state before the migration process was started by using the
transactional-update rollback command.
The detailed procedure for a system rollback is described in Section 3.3, “System rollback”.