This milestone tracks the effort to migrate the XNAT VM from the HyperV (maintained by InfraOps) to cloud.rc (maintained by the RC team).

The motivation for this migration came from the need to upgrade the OS on the XNAT VM to RHEL 8 because the current OS (RHEL7) support expires April 16 2026. This OS upgrade will be easier and faster to accomplish on cloud.rc because we are in control of the VM provisioning process. We already have a working xnat instance running on RHEL8 that we instantiated in an attempt to resolve a bug faced by the XNAT user community.

OS Upgrade plan for XNAT

• Create an O~S project called xnat-prod to upgrade the OS on the XNAT VM.
• Allocate a new FIP for the XNAT instance in the xnat-prod O~S project
• Allow NFS access to GPFS5 for the XNAT instance in O~S.
• Instantiate a new XNAT 1.9.1 VM on RHEL8 in O~S that is functionally equivalent to the current prod XNAT
• Replicate the DB from HyperV to OpenStack - Follow the process similar to RedCap migration.
  • Create a replica of the XNAT PostgreSQL DB on O~S side. This DB replica will be on a separate non-root volume attached to the new instance.
  • Let it sync with the main DB.
• Include the excalidraw diagram for this replication process in the issue.
• Confirm everything works as expected and cutover. The cutover process includes DNS change to point to the new IP.

For future upgrades

• Create a new XNAT VM.
• Shutdown and detach the volume from the old XNAT.
• Attach the current DB volume to this new instance.