Looking for best practice for moving zimbra from one server to another?

[jdell]

I have a test server that has worked very well, and I have put a fair bit of work into the mailing lists, resources, users, etc. I am planning the move to a production server and would like to be able to 'copy' the test server instance of zimbra over to the production server (new hardware) rather than re-enter all that data on a new instance of zcs.

I didn't see anything in the wiki about 'moving servers', so I thought i'd post here, to ask for help.

The hostname for the production server will be the same as the test server. However, the new server will have more memory and a different IP address.

So here was my initial idea on how to do this (please shoot holes in it!)
- Build production server
- Install zcs
- stop all zcs services on both servers
- change MX record to point to new server (ttl is min)
- delete /opt/zimbra on new server
- copy /opt/zimbra/* from test server to new server
- reboot and cross fingers...

Does zcs contain everything in /opt/zimbra/* besides the /etc/init.d script? Can you just move a server like that?

Thanks for any advice and or pointers to the proper way to do this.

Regards,
John

[jdell]

I am using the network edition, and I just discovered the zmbackup/zmrestore commands ;-) Shouldn't be working late, brain gets mushy...

So, would this get it done? http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?tit..._Suite_Servers

Thanks,
John

[mjfleck2000]

>I am planning the move to a production server and would like to be able to '>copy' the test server instance of zimbra over to the production server (new >hardware) rather than re-enter all that data on a new instance of zcs.

I just did this... moving one test lan computer to a new lan computer. I had a very underpowered machine as a test. I moved Zimbra to a better computer (and this machine is still a test computer!). The entire operation took about two hours total. I basically set up the new machine to be just like the old machine except for a new IP address. The steps, as I remember them were:

1) I installed Kubuntu dapper on the new comptuer. To start, I set the machine name to test and assigned an new internal lan IP address.
2) Apt-get updated test.
3) Install openssh-server and bind9 on test.
4)ssh copied zimbra from old machine to test but put it in a temp directory: scp -r oldmachine://opt/zimbra test://opt/oldzimbra
5)Switched to runlevel 1 on oldmachine.
6) Setup hostname for test to be same as oldmachine
7) Set up resolv.conf to be the same as oldmachine.
8) Set up /etc/bind/named.conf.local to be the same as oldmachine EXCEPT with the new IP for test.
9) Set up /etc/bind/northidahoeye.com.hosts to be the same as oldmachine.
10) Set up /etc/hosts to be the same as oldmachine EXCEPT with the new IP for test.
11) Apt-get installed prerequsites for ubuntu dapper.
12) Downloaded and installed zimbra.
13) Rebooted to ensure that everything comes up as it should and checked that all is working on test.
14)Switched to runlevel 1
15) moved /opt/zimbra to /opt/zimbra.test.
16) moved /opt/oldzimbra to /opt/zimbra
17) rebooted.

Worked just fine.

Mike