select boot device – UEFI ATEN Virtual CDROM SCREENSHOT 4) If you booted from the CD you would get this first screen – select “Install CentOS Linux ” and hit Enter Start CentOS 8 SCREENSHOT 5) The kernel and the live system are loading… Booting from the CD SCREENSHOT 6) Choose your system language. MegaRAID controller initiliazed SCREENSHOT 3) Select the UEFI boot mode of the Virtual CDROM and hit “Enter” to continue. SCREENSHOT 2) The MegaRAID controller and the virtual drives are initiliazed.

Network installation – using CentOS-8-x86_64-1905-boot.iso.

All system parititions will be removed (grub, boot, root) and a clean minimal installation will be performed.

The installation disk is mounted in the Virtual CD/DVD IPMI KVM device – with Mount and boot ISO file from windows share in Supermicro IPMI Virtual media (CD-ROM).

IPMI KVM is used to install the new Linux distribution – CentOS 8.

Upgrade to CentOS 8 with clean install over our old CentOS 7 system partitions preserving the big data partitions.

Have in mind most modern Linux distributions cannot be installed on less than 10G~20G and for optimal results just separate between 30G and 50G for 4 partitions above (or 3 if you choose to skip the boot one). The best practice is have total between 30G and 50G for the 4 partitions (in fact, boot partition could be skipped). Here we have two hardware controllers, which we want to use both for the system partitions. You can skip the software RAID1 setup if you use only one controller or you have system partitions only in one disk (virtual drive and so on).

Of course, when there are partitions above 2T the GPT is mandatory. Number Start End Size File system Name Flagsĥ 71.8GB 48.0TB 47.9TB ~]# parted /dev/sdb -script printįilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Here is the partitions ~]# parted /dev/sda -script print Our storage has 2 storage partitions, which means they hosts only data and no system files and there are separate partitions for Linux booting (grub2) and system files (root partition). root partition should be only for system files and nothing more! Keeping this simple rule you may easily change your operating system (or clean install or clean upgrade) without deleting the user’s data thus preserving the old storage partitions.

Always put your root partition separate from the storage (aka data) partitions.

Centos 8 install