On one of the servers I needed to do an upgrade for mysql so I found am easy way to do it following the instructions from the mysql website.

As a summary this is what you need to do:
wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/mysql-community-release-el6-5.noarch.rpm
yum localinstall mysql-community-release-el6-5.noarch.rpm
yum update mysql-server

!please note as the time I write this there wasn’t a supported way to automatically update 5.1 to 5.6/5.7 directly. It is first adviced to do the update to 5.5 first. I learned this the hard way 🙂

So choose the version you need via
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/mysql-community.repo