We've been supporting customers on wild range of architectures, nowadays mostly ia64. Good luck preparing major upgrades there when you can't test it in the LAB. Each upgrade was its own adventure. Issues where the whole factory had to be at full stop or when trucks were causing major traffic jam in big city due to failed cluster upgrade.
Now look, here you have free software you can use with certain level of support. It's all known, not hidden anywhere.
I'm not happy about leaving 12.x either as all my prod data are on ZFS that stems from good old SUN. But SUN is no more..
Now look, here you have free software you can use with certain level of support. It's all known, not hidden anywhere.
Most likely you're on some sort of x86. You can create VM anywhere nowadays (even average laptop), do a restore of you box in VM, test, and make sure you catch most if not all issues.I can't immediately upgrade from php5.6 to php7.4 and from mysql5.6 to mysql8.0.
I'm not happy about leaving 12.x either as all my prod data are on ZFS that stems from good old SUN. But SUN is no more..