OS Upgrade Considerations for PXF

PXF 6.3.0 introduces support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x. If you plan to upgrade the operating system in your Greenplum Database cluster hosts to RHEL 8 and you are running PXF in your Greenplum installation, you must perform some PXF-specific actions before and after you upgrade the OS.

The following procedures assume that you are upgrading the OS on a different set of hosts than that of the current/running Greenplum cluster.

Pre-OS Upgrade Actions

Perform the following steps before you upgrade the operating system:

Upgrade PXF in your current cluster to at least version v6.3.0 (the first release with RHEL 8 support) and verify PXF operation before you commence the OS upgrade.
Retain the following PXF user configuration directories, typically located in /usr/local/pxf-gp6: conf/, keytabs/, lib/, and servers/. If you relocated $PXF_BASE, retain the configuration in that directory.

Post-OS Upgrade Actions

After you upgrade the operating system and install, configure, and verify Greenplum Database on the new set of hosts, perform the following procedure:

Download a PXF package for the upgraded OS from Broadcom Support Portal. You must download the same version of PXF as the version that was running on the original Greenplum Database cluster.

Note
For more information about download prerequisites, troubleshooting, and instructions, see Download Broadcom products and software.
Install PXF for RHEL 8 on all Greenplum Database hosts.
Copy the PXF configuration files from the original cluster to /user/local/pxf-gp6 on the RHEL 8 Greenplum Database master host. If you choose to relocate $PXF_BASE, copy the configuration to that directory instead.
Synchronize the PXF configuration to all hosts in the Greenplum cluster:
```
gpadmin@gpmaster$ pxf cluster sync
```
Start PXF on each Greenplum host:
```
gpadmin@gpmaster$ pxf cluster start
```
Verify that PXF can access each external data source by querying external tables that specify each PXF server configuration.