[SOLVED] Recommendations for new server

[jadestorm]

Hi folk!

I've got a number of things I want to do at the same time here, so I wanted to ask for some suggestions. =)

First off, I am currently running Zimbra 4.5.10 on a Centos 4 box. Now, this box is a box that I run a lot of things on. So I have to change a lot of ports that Zimbra uses so they don't conflict with existing services.

There are a number of things I'd like to move towards:
1. Running Zimbra on a VM under my centos box. Number of advantages to this. One of which of course is that I don't have to mod ports.
2. Upgrading to 5.0
3. Running a different OS dist on the VM. (I'm thinking Debian 4 actually)

So.. regarding 1, no real questions there unless you know of some big caveats to this approach.

Regarding 2, clearly it would be easier to migrate my Centos 4 4.5.10 to 5.0 without also changing OS's.

Regarding 3... there's the catch. Now I did find what looked like a good writeup of how to migrated from one os to another. Basically it looked like the procedure would be, install the 4.5.10 deb's (using the -s flag to install.sh) on the debian vm, then remove /opt/zimbra, copy my centos /opt/zimbra to that machine .. then after that I imagine I could run the 5.0 upgrade procedure "like normal". I don't have the url handy at the moment that I was looking at, but hey.

I was also wondering ... since I am currently at the luxury of installing just about whatever I want ... what is y'all's "preferred" OS dist? Do you do most of your development work on Debian? RHEL? Fedora? something else? Might help influence my choice.

Other thoughts? This a bad idea? Thanks!!!

[mmorse]

I would stick with CentOS as it's very close to RHEL (a heavily tested NE supported platform).
The article you we're probably reading was /blog/archives/2007/10/moving_zcs_to_another_server.html
It covers doing a operating system change as well, the basic key is to keep your same zimbra version # for the platform switch.
So you would be doing just CentOS 4 > CentOS 5.
If you wanted to switch to Debian, you'd have to put on Debian 3.1 for zcs4.5.10 then wait till the 5.0.1/later comes out to put on Debian 4 as noted here: ZCS 5.0 FOSS is Released!!!

*-Upgrading from SUSE 9 ZCS 4.5.x to SUSE 10 ZCS 5.0, from Debian 3.1 ZCS 4.5.x to Debian 4.0 ZCS 5.0, and Fedora core 4 & 5 ZCS 4.5.x to Fedora 7 ZCS 5.0are not yet supported.

Plus that would mean you are doing this procedure twice instead of once...
Make sure all is working correctly with your zcs4.5.10 after you get on CentOS 5 before you attempt a zcs5.0 upgrade, as it's much harder to downgrade zimbra.

[mmorse]

Oh & if you stay on CentOS 4.5 be advised that zcs5.0 GA ships an XS compiled version of Scalar::Util in its perl modules for RHEL4. As root, read the ~zimbra/.bashrc, and set the PERLLIB and PERL5LIB environment variables to match what the zimbra user does, and then try installing. As usual, don't forget a backup!

[jadestorm]

I got it! I'm going to make a separate post about my particular procedure, since it was pretty complex and might be helpful to others!