How to upgrade from Zimbra 6/Centos 5 to Zimbra 8/Centos 6?

abatie · Post by **abatie** » Thu Sep 11, 2014 9:02 pm

We've been running Zimbra 6.0.5 on Centos 5 for several years now, and it's time to upgrade to Zimbra 8.5. Zimbra 6 won't run on Centos 6 and Zimbra 8 won't run on Centos 5. There is no upgrade from Centos 5 to 6, you need to reinstall. For manageability, we are running the zimbra hosts in vmware with /opt/zimbra on its own virtual disk. I'm trying a procedure where I upgrade zimbra 6 to 7 on centos 5, install zimbra 7 on centos 6, move the /opt/zimbra disk from the c5 to th c6 machine and then upgrade 7 to 8. Unfortunately, the upgrade appears to be trying to run things out of the /opt/zimbra before it installs new binaries and in general being flaky. I tried doing an in place upgrade from 7 to 7 on the c6 machine in hopes it would upgrade the binaries, but that was flaky (somehow it thought it was an ldap replica when the test case was a single machine instance?!?). Tomorrow I'm going to just rsync /opt/zimbra instead of trying to move snapshot files (which I'd *really* like to do rather than copying the large message store disks!) in case I'm not getting the vmdks attached quite right.
In the meantime, there must be a proper procedure for upgrading the OS like this - if someone could point me to it, I'd appreciate it...

phoenix · Post by **phoenix** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 5:42 am

Assuming that you're moving to a new server, why don't you take a look at the ZeXtras migration tool?

Post by **tonster** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 7:39 am

I would suggest taking a look at http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Ajcody-Notes-Server-Move for details on moving to a new OS. I would also suggest staying more current on ZCS if possible, as 6.0.5 has been EOL for several years now, and has many known security vulnerabilities.

My suggestion would be to start by moving to ZCS 7.2.7 on CentOS 5. At that point, you would be able to follow the process above to move your 7.2.7 system from the CentOS5 server to the CentOS6 server. I would definitely not suggest going the route of using zeXtras.

abatie · Post by **abatie** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 1:32 pm

Thanks! the Server-Move note is exactly what I was looking for. Upgrading to 7 first was clearly a requirement. We're still hoping to avoid moving mailboxes between stores, but I'll see what I can work out...

Post by **tonster** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 3:16 pm

If you follow the server-move Wiki of Adam's, your downtime will be fairly minimal. You can do most of the rsyncing of data while the system is online, and then do a final rsync when the system is down (which will take only a short period of time to sync the difference since the last sync).