Hello. It's been a while. For the past couple years I've had a cluster running Nautilus on Debian 10 using the Debian Ceph packages, and deployed with Ceph-Ansible. It's not a huge cluster - 10 OSD nodes with 80 x 12TB HDD OSDs, plus 3 management nodes, and about 40% full at the moment - but it is a critical resource for one of our researchers. Back then I had some misgivings about non-Debian packages and also about containerized Ceph. I don't know if my feelings about these things have changed that much, but it's time to upgrade, and, with the advent of cephadm it looks like it's just better to stay mainstream. So I'm looking for advice on how to get from where I'm at to at least Pacific or Quincy. I've read a little in the last couple days. I've seen various opinions on (not) skipping releases and on when to switch to cephadm. I'm also concerned about cleaning up those old Debian packages - will there be a point where I can 'apt-get purge' them without harming the cluster. One particular thing: The upgrade instructions in various places on docs.ceph.com say something like Upgrade monitors by installing the new packages and restarting the monitor daemons. To me this is kind of vague. Perhaps there is a different concept fo 'packages' within the cephadm environment. I could really use some clarification on this. I'd also consider decommissioning a few nodes, setting up a new cluster on fresh Debian installs. and migrating the data and remaining nodes. This would be a long and painful process - decommission a node, move it, move some data, decommission another node - and I don't know what effect it would have on external references to our object store. Please advise. Thanks. -Dave -- Dave Hall Binghamton University kdhall@binghamton.edu