I have a headless installation that I'm still running OMV5 on. At this point that's obviously very out of date. What are my options for an upgrade? Do I need to go OMV5 to OMV6 first? If I do a "fresh install" is it going to retain all of my running services or would I need to set the whole thing up from scratch? I'm not a full time linux person so my knowledge is very limited. Frankly I've never actually had any problems with it so I've never really bothered to change anything.
I'm still on OMV 5, what's my upgrade path?
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ryecoaaron
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You would have to upgrade from OMV5 to OMV6 and then from OMV6 to OMV7.
The path is very long and full of obstacles after all this time. I suggest you wait for OMV8 (it's close to its stable version) and do a clean install of OMV8. Simply take screenshots of your OMV5 configuration; this will help you set up the new system. Disconnect the data disks, install OMV8 when it's stable, then reconnect the data disks and mount the existing file systems. Reconfigure the services using the screenshots as a guide.
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What do you mean by "in-place installation"?
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I've added a lot of packages outside of the OMV UI and made countless tweaks as I've used the system. I do not believe screenshots would be sufficient to restore my configuration. I'm really thinking more either in-place installation or just doing nothing, because I have had no actual issues with it other than packages that aren't available on older debian. Not breaking anything that's currently working is my top priority, especially since I access a lot of the functionality via windows and stuff like SMB took forever to get working correctly.
Until just over a month ago, I too was stuck on OMV 5. And I've been in the same boat - having tweaked a lot of things outside of OMV itself, configured everything just the way I like it, etc. - so yes, the prospect of a completely fresh install is daunting.
But consider that even if your system is continuing to work just fine, eventually it won't. You've already missed out on security updates at the least, and something will come and bite you.
I spent the last month setting up OMV 7 from scratch (I prefer to wait for OMV8 to be stable and an upgrade path to become available before I go that route). It took a lot of time but was SO worth it. Many of the things I'd bolted on to the old OMV5 install I was able to reconfigure in a much cleaner way using the OMV7 GUI (for example, setting up a network bridge interface, WireGuard, moving Emby from host-level operation to a Docker container, even automatic updating of my SSL cert via acme.sh and update_cert.sh, etc.). As I've gained a lot of experience both with OMV and with Linux/Debian generally, I'm now happy with a more polished and up-to-date system. Most importantly, I'm back in the loop with functionality and security updates - AND a proper upgrade path. Then there's the plugins - there's a whole lot more of them than in OMV5. The KVM and Compose plugins alone are superb.
Consider these points. I recommend that you take the time for a fresh install and just go step by step. Maybe you can spare another computer as a temporary server in the meantime - I did this, too, by cloning the old OMV5 install to a mini-PC and some of my data copied to an external HDD.
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What do you mean by "in-place installation"?
Upgrade on my current machine without losing my current configuration. There's no way I can remember every package I've installed and every dotfile I've edited on this machine. If i had to start from scratch I'm not even sure I would stick with OMV.
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Upgrade on my current machine without losing my current configuration. There's no way I can remember every package I've installed and every dotfile I've edited on this machine. If i had to start from scratch I'm not even sure I would stick with OMV.
If that is your goal then your only path is to upgrade 5->6->7. As stated already, this will be very difficult, and likely not to succede. But you have nothing to lose by trying if and only if you try this on a copy of your existing installation.
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Upgrade on my current machine without losing my current configuration. There's no way I can remember every package I've installed and every dotfile I've edited on this machine
If you attempt it, you'd be well served by cloning your boot drive, testing the clone, then running the upgrade attempt on the clone. As gderf has indicated, there's a good chance the process will fail. With that many upgrades, I'd put the chance of success at 50/50 and that's being optimistic. (Note that software repo's, over time, may be "frozen" or archived and, in some cases, packages within them may change or even go off-line.)
If you go the upgrade route, to increase your chances of success, it will necessary to check your plugins to insure that the plugins you're using in OMV5 have exact counterparts in 6, and then do the same thing when going from 6 to 7. Support for some plugins changed in these versions and / or some plugins were dropped in favor of Dockers so that's another consideration.
Frankly, I believe the path of least resistance (and the least time expenditure) would be to wait until 8 is out of Beta, then build OMV8 from scratch on another boot drive so you'd have the option to back out. Yes, this will require reconstructing server add-on's or getting to know Docker and adding them back that way. But you have to look at reality; you're going to have to do this eventually and when that event rolls around you'll be forced to do it when something fails. Nothing lasts forever. A new build would be easier to manage if you're not under the gun.
(You might even consider building a second server and copying networks shares from OMV5 to OMV8.)
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