Zimbra Collaboration Appliance End-of-Life and Update to Zimbra Collaboration Server

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With the release of Zimbra Collaboration v8.0.6 this week, we are announcing the end-of-life of our Zimbra Collaboration Appliance. With this release, we will not be providing further updates to the Zimbra Appliance, and Appliance users are encouraged to follow our recommended upgrade path to Zimbra Collaboration Server, at their earliest convenience. The Appliance will be under a Technical Guidance period through December 15, 2014, where Technical Guidance means customers can receive operational support and recommended workarounds from Zimbra Support. Technical Guidance is further defined here: Zimbra Support Life Cycle
The Zimbra Collaboration Appliance was intended to provide simplified installation and updates through a turnkey solution combining the Operating System and Zimbra Application on the VMware vSphere platforms. However, users of the Zimbra Appliance consistently requested better control of storage configurations, Linux OS, high availability options and support for other hypervisors including KVM and Xen.
These capabilities are already available with the Zimbra Collaboration Server and are enhanced further in the next release of Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.5, due in the first half of 2014. Additionally, due to code-signing certificate changes between VMware and Zimbra, an in-place upgrade to a new version of the Appliance was no longer technically possible and would require a migration.
However, with Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.0.6 we are providing [URL=upgrade instructions[/URL] for an upgrade from any previous version of the Zimbra Collaboration Appliance 8.0.x to Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.0.6. This is an in-place upgrade and will allow you to continue to take advantage of bug fixes, security updates, and future enhancements. And if you have questions during this process, you can of course contact Zimbra Technical Support. Upgrade instructions can be found here.
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After the in-place upgrade, there are few administration differences between the Zimbra Collaboration Appliance and the Zimbra Collaboration Server versions of the product. The key difference is the need to execute the package update command for the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Operating System that was originally packaged with the Appliance. Instructions to do this can be found here.
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Thank you to those Zimbra customers who have used or tested the Zimbra Appliance, for providing us with feedback that has guided us to this resolution. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to your Zimbra account representative, or Zimbra Technical Support.