[chef] Re: Moving from gem chef to omnibus

[Peter Donald < >]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Jens Skott < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Im not sure if this has been brought up before, but since omnibus
seems to be the prefered way to install chef in the future, both
client and server I was thinking about moving from gem installation to
omnibus. My questions are now. Whats the easiest way to do the move? I
need all my old conf and data from my current chef server including
certificates for the clients and so fourth in the new installation
aswell.
Is there a good way to do it. Was reading the wiki and it only told my
how to install it. But not how to migrate data and how to move from
gem to omnibus.

A while ago I moved all the clients across to omnibus and it was relatively painless. I would highly recommend the use of heavywaters cookbook [1] - I used it to move each of my nodes across and remove the old packages. I also use it to update the omnibus packages from time to time. 

About the only hiccup was that the cookbook did not restart chef-client if it was running as a service and thus the old clients were still in memory. I think I manually knife ssh'ed in and restarted chef-client on the relevant nodes.

As for upgfrading the server - we decided it was not work the risk to upgrade to omnibus just yet as it was running just fine.  The plan is to move across to omnibus chef server when chef 11 comes out as that is likely to have a nice upgrade/migrate mechanism in place. YMMV

[1] https://github.com/hw-cookbooks/omnibus_updater

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Cheers,

Peter Donald