16.04 and 20.04 side by side on one harddisk

[Lentes, Bernd]

Hi,

we have an Ubuntu 16.04 installed on a normal pc. It has installed a lot of applications, especially Bioinformatic tools which have been complicated to install.
We are thinking of upgrading to 20.04, but want to keep the old installation as an emergency solution.
I'm thinking of installing 20.04 beside 16.04 so that we can try to get all applications running on 20.04, but still having 16.04.
I never did that before, that's why i asked. Is that possible ?
I assume Grub is intelligent enough to recognize the old system during the installation of 20.04 and insert it in the boot menu.
Yes ?
Beside the two systems we have large partitions (several TB) with data.

Another idea is to use virtualization, KVM. Install KVM on 16.04 and install 20.04 in a VM.
So we have both systems running simultaneously.
We could change the FS of the data partitions to OCFS2, so concurrent access should be possible.
I found an article using OCFS2 without pacemaker, it seems to be easy.
Can i access partitions directly with a VM under KVM ?


Bernd

-- 

Bernd Lentes 
System Administrator 
Institute for Metabolism and Cell Death (MCD) 
Building 25 - office 122 
HelmholtzZentrum München 
bernd.lentes at helmholtz-muenchen.de 
phone: +49 89 3187 1241 
phone: +49 89 3187 3827 
fax: +49 89 3187 2294 
http://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/mcd
Helmholtz Zentrum München

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