Technical support may no longer be available for operating systems due to reasons such as the end of service lifecycle, end of third-party support, or evolution of open source projects. For example, CentOS has announced the end of life (EOL) for CentOS Linux versions, including CentOS 7 and CentOS 8. 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 Elastic Compute Service (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.
For more information about the maintenance cycle of operating systems, see Maintenance support for operating systems.
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.
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.
Migration process
The following figure shows the process of migrating CentOS 7 that runs on an ECS instance to Alibaba Cloud Linux 3.
Usage notes
Only migration schemes described in the following tables are supported.
Linux
| Operating system architecture | Source operating system | Destination operating system |
| x86 | CentOS 7 |
|
| CentOS 8 |
| |
| ARM64 | CentOS 7 |
|
| CentOS 8 |
|
- The operating system to be migrated must be the operating system of an ECS instance within the current Alibaba Cloud account.
- Alibaba Cloud Linux 2 and 3 do not support GUIs. You can migrate your CentOS operating system with a GUI to Anolis OS.
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 2012 R2 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English) Important The language of the destination operating system must be the same as that of the source operating system. |
|
Important The language of the destination operating system must be the same as that of the source operating system. | |
| Windows Server 2019 Datacenter 64-bit (Chinese/English) Important The language of the destination operating system must be the same as that of the source operating system. |
Migration procedure
Applications that are installed based on the original system kernel may not run properly after migration. We recommend that you test and verify all business applications in the destination operating system environment in advance to ensure the compatibility and performance between the applications and the destination operating system. Then, you can use SMC to migrate the source operating system to the destination operating system.
For more information about how to migrate or upgrade a Linux operating system, see Migrate a Linux operating system.
For more information about how to migrate or upgrade a Windows operating system, see Migrate a Windows operating system.