Migrate FOSS 8.8.15 to fresh new Zimbra 10 Network Edition,

[mr_jack]

Hello guys,

We are going to migrate our 8.8.15 FOSS Zimbra server to Zimbra 10 Network Edition.
In the past we migrated all of our FOSS servers to a clean environment and used the Zextras migration tool to migrate the data.
The reason we follow this path is that the original server isn't at risk and we have some time if needed to troubleshoot on the new server before we make the switch.

Since that route is not available anymore ( the Zextras migration tool ). What are the best options for this ?

I would preferably not mess / upgrade etc the current 8.8.15 server.

I've been reading up in the forums and there are some different options, since v10 is out for a while. With which migrations have you got good experience with ?

Regarding the optons :

- I have the rsync method. What I can do is install Zimbra 8.8.15 on the new environment, rsync the data, and than upgrade. I would rather have not have legacy 8.8.15 stuff on my server, but if this is the way. This is the way.
- or do an imapsync, as discussed here, viewtopic.php?p=310979#p310979 ,
- or.....

I'm open to any advice,

Thank you in advance,

Jack

[L. Mark Stone]

I would use, and have used successfully, the documented Rolling Upgrade method.

[EDIT - 22 July 2024]
Regrettably, you cannot use the Rolling Upgrade to go from FOSS to NE in some cases.

Yes, you can do almost all of the steps in a Rolling Upgrade with FOSS>NE, but when you get to the last step, the mailbox moves, this will fail.

The reason is that zmmboxmove on the NE mailstore relies on some NE (or NG, or Zimbra Suite Plus) backup code on the FOSS server to dump the MariaDB databases for that mailbox.

That code is NOT present in FOSS alone, nor in Zextras. So, even if you have a FOSS system with licensed Zextras, you cannot move mailboxes in the last phase of the Rolling Upgrade.

[mr_jack]

Hi Mark,

thank you for the reply.

This involves upgrading the production server. Which I would rather not touch.

That is working without issues, and I would really like to keep it that way.

An new environment and moving a backup / mailboxes over is a difficult exercise from version 8 to 10 ?

Thanks,

Jack.

[L. Mark Stone]

The only changes to the existing Production server during a Rolling Upgrade comprise:

- Turning on LDAP MMR
- Changing the zimbraServiceEnabled attribute to turn off (in stages) LDAP, Proxy and MTA services and restarting Zimbra.

These are all low-risk operations; the zimbraServiceEnabled changes are easily reversible. Have done this no small number of times already; no major issues to date.

The times I haven't done this is when the customer was concerned about the sanctity of their existing system, and wanted to start totally clean. In those cases, we used either IMAPSYNC and Contacts/Calendars Export/imports to move the data over, or the rsync method if they were OK reusing their existing LDAP.

Zimbra has published a utility to restore NG Backups it is true; it's really for compliance purposes, like, to keep a readable backup for several years. Zimbra specifically suggest NOT using it like we could use the NG Backups to perform a server-to-server move, while also changing the operating system and Zimbra versions at the same time.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[gabrieles]

- Turning on LDAP MMR

MMR is a one way road, this binds ldap to be MMR forever even with a single master.
We prefer to install new ldap replica, then promote it to new master (and disabling the ldap service on the old server)
This guide https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Promoting_ ... Master_8.0 worked well for years from 8.0 to 10

[L. Mark Stone]

Having a single LDAP MMR server is not an issue technically.

Yes, it will get lonely and pine away in the logs for its partner, but the Rolling Upgrade docs include a cron job to prune those entries from zimbra.log.

And, you can always dump LDAP, do zmldapinit, and import LDAP to get rid of MMR.

[jtflottorp]

It was mentioned a utility to restore from ng backup, does anybody have a link to it?

[Klug]

Daffodil (v10) and NG backups contain different format and you will not be able to directly use the Daffodil (v10) Backup & Restore feature to restore your NG backups. Also, if the NG backup is used for anything other than disaster recovery, we recommend copying the NG backup to an archive location. Zimbra has created a tool to allow the restoration of message data for auditing and recovery purposes only.

And

Restoring from old NG backups for disaster recovery is not recommended.

However, here's the tool (NE only I guess): https://zimbra.github.io/documentation/ ... _zimbra_10

[mutface]

By the way - I found this really useful script that will migrate emails, calendars, briefcases, share settings, filters, contacts, etc. between any version of Zimbra to any linux distribution. So for instance, I've been able to migrate really old Zimbra instances from Centos 6 to rocky Linux 8. From Zimbra 7 to Zimbra 8, etc.

https://github.com/hodfords/zimbra-migration

It runs on shell scripts and is quite good; it is also open source too.

[Michl]

Not for nothing, but I tried that script and it did not work, not even close. I even purchased a copy of imapsync at $60 for the purpose. It all looked like it was working; the script finished successfully including invoking imapsync which also finished successfully. Unfortunately it migrated almost none of my email. I was actually surprised at how fast it all went, because while I don't have the biggest mail store in the world, it still is 12G, and just straight copying that across the network using rsync takes some hours. This finished in a matter of minutes.

Currently, I'm just following the upgrade path I've found on some other pages, so far it seems to make a lot more sense. I'll report back with results when I'm done before reporting what steps I took so as not to send anyone down a garden path.

Just for information about the upgrade, I am moving from Zimbra 8.8.15 running on Ubuntu 18.0.4.6 to Zimbra 10.1.4 on Ubuntu 22.0.4.