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:

1. 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.

2. 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:

1. Download a PXF RHEL 8 package from VMware Tanzu Network. You must download the same version of PXF as that was running on the original Greenplum Database cluster.

2. Install PXF for RHEL 8 on all Greenplum Database hosts.

3. 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.

4. Synchronize the PXF configuration to all hosts in the Greenplum cluster:

   gpadmin@gpmaster$ pxf cluster sync
   

5. Start PXF on each Greenplum host:

   gpadmin@gpmaster$ pxf cluster start
   

6. Verify that PXF can access each external data source by querying external tables that specify each PXF server configuration.