Hi David,davidkillingsworth wrote: ↑Wed May 31, 2023 7:16 am I just saw the notification on the email newsletter of the latest blog announcement today. I hadn't noticed the announcement in early April.
Zimbra 9.0.0 End of General Support: 03/31/2024
Zimbra 8.8.15 End of General Support: 12/31/2023
7 months is what you give us?
I have been setting up Zimbra servers and managing them for clients for 12 years. I still manage several of them because the products works well and we have the skills to support it. I have contributed significantly to this support forum and I have reported and commented on many bugs, back in the day when you could. I have commented on many of the blog posts. I have like I have contributed to this project in a constructive way.
This EOL announcement is very very frustrating. This feels like a huge slap in the face. I just have to ask WHY?
- There is no clear upgrade path from 8.8.15. All of our servers are running 8.8.15.
- They haven't even announced a community edition version of 10 yet.
- Many times updates / patches have broken servers during the upgrade process over the past 4 or 5 years. To the point where I spool mail at a 3rd party gateway, take a full backup of my server, and then do the upgrades and thoroughly test before even applying small patches because I don't trust the updates not to break things. The product is not QA tested well.
- They removed the ability for the community edition public (non Network version) to report and comment on bugs anymore. Please bring that back so that we can help improve the product.
Even if we migrate to another product, only giving us 7 months is just a terrible way about going about things.
- I don't know how long 10 has been out, but I can't imagine that it has been thoroughly tested in production environments very long.
I would really like to continue using this product and recommending it to clients, but why should I trust Synacor after this.
We both go back with Zimbra for more than a decade, and I share your frustration about the lack of clarity/maturity around the various upgrade paths to Zimbra 10 available to us.
I've never been an apologist for Zimbra but as an active participant on the weekly Zeta calls I thought it might be helpful to provide what clarity I can, based on what I've been given to understand from Zimbra directly.
Upgrade Paths are documented here (https://zimbra.github.io/documentation/ ... grade.html) and here (https://zimbra.github.io/documentation/ ... grade.html). In-place upgrades when you have the NG modules installed are not supported, but there is a switch for the installer to do so if you wish. If you run the Zimbra 10 installer on a system with NG installed, the installer will disclose the switch to you. There is a Rolling Upgrade for NG migrations process that is IMHO confusingly documented, and on yesterday's Zeta Alliance call several other partners communicated that they too were unclear on the process as described in the documentation. Zimbra have agreed to update the documentation.
I totally agree the whole upgrade process documentation is happening way too late. I think many of us were also thinking (gambling?) that Zimbra would just extend the End of General Support dates, like they did for 8.6 and 8.7.11, to make sure customers had enough time to migrate. I'm seeing greater pushback from Zimbra whenever I've brought that up this time around FWIW.
Community Edition. For the benefit of others newer to Zimbra, Zimbra stopped producing Open Source Edition binaries starting with version 9. However, the zm-build scripts work with both Zimbra 9 and Zimbra 10. The annoyance is you have to rebuild Zimbra each time a patch comes out, because the patch packages have Network Edition dependencies. My personal speculation is that there is insufficient product differentiation between OSE and NE, and since as compared to other open source projects that have a much higher level of code commits from the community (which lowers development costs), to stay in business Zimbra needs revenues to feed the bottom line.
No one I know inside of Zimbra is a fan of "crippleware", but I have seen other open source companies release the free version of their software with scaling limitations, and I have suggested that to Zimbra as a quid pro quo to begin releasing OSE binaries once more. I want Zimbra to make money and build market share, and certainly the case studies around Citrix open sourcing Xen Server and losing lots of money have served as a warning shot across the bow to many open source-derived software companies.
Patches. Yup. Zimbra's recent track record at producing consistently regression-free patches need significant improvement. An on-premises professional services customer of mine last night applied the latest patch, Zimbra restarted fine but the proxy service couldn't talk to the mailbox service (single server). Support wound up doing an in-place upgrade to the same version (didn't solve the issue) and then backing out a jar file or two to the previous versions (which did work). It's a pretty vanilla system; it all got escalated and the customer expects to hear back today on next steps. I would also say the Patch Release Notes could use improvements as well. The first release of the 8.8.15 notes had significant formatting issues (one still there as of this morning) and links to internal-only web sites. The links were fixed as of this morning.
Community Edition Feedback. It seems to have all moved to Git Hub. I created a Git Hub account, pointed out an obvious error in the LDAP MMR multi-server installation guide, and last I looked the request still wasn't acted on. The good news is pm.zimbra.com is back! So we can at least get some visibility into what's being developed, and make suggestions on the road map. But, pm.zimbra.com is NOT meant to be a bug reporting avenue. What I've told other OSE customers is that if you spot a bug that you can document and reproduce consistently, send me a PM and I'll open a Support Case on my account for the bug.
Zimbra 10 History. Zimbra 10 was released as Early Access in the Fall of 2022, and went GA this spring. Oversimplifying for clarity, probably to the point of some inaccuracy, Zimbra 10 is pretty much Zimbra 9 with the NG bits removed and replaced by Zimbra-native code--code that's mostly been around and deployed with Zimbra's own customers sometimes for years. Zimbra has had an S3 connector for years as I understand it. The Zimbra 10 backups are the proven NE Classic backups that have been in the product for years, with some enhancements. Delegated Admin is also what has been in the product for many years, enhanced with more Wizards in the Admin Console for common delegated admin roles that previously were a PITA to create by hand (I have a blog post for creating password-change-only delegated admins that gets a hundred or so hits each month). The mobile management bits I believe are the newest, largest blocks of functional code, but even that I have been given to understand has been deployed at Zimbra customer sites for a while. I personally am frustrated that Zimbra 10 was released without Ubuntu 22.04 binaries being available, but I'm given to understand those are coming "soon". And I'm holding off my Zimbra 10 migration until then as well.
Again personally, I will be glad when Zimbra 10 is the only game in town, so the developers have fewer code repos to maintain, build and test. I'd like to believe that in that "new regime", we should see improvements in documentation, regression-free patch releases etc. If we don't, as you say, customers will go elsewhere.
But the route to get to Zimbra 10 is much less smooth than it could/should be. Hopefully we'll see some improvements over the next month or two.
All the best,
Mark
