Migration from ZCS 5.0.22/Mac OS X 10.5 to ZCS 7.1.0/Ubuntu 10.04_64bit

[fab]

Hello,
we actually have two Zimbra servers running Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 with ZCS 5.0.22 but we are planning to migrate to Vmware ESXi 4.1 with Ubuntu 10.04_LTS 64 bit as the guest OS.
FYI, we have 3500 users; a server is the primary_ldap/primary_mta-antispam/logger while the other is the mailbox/backup_mta-antispam/backup_ldap; all incoming messages from other domains are filtered for viruses and spam by two clustered Sophos appliances before going to the ZCS servers.
I have read the 32 to 64 bit migration guides in the Zimbra wiki and searched though the forums, but could not find a valid solution to my problem.
On Moving ZCS to New Server - Zimbra :: Wiki and Network Edition: Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit Server - Zimbra :: Wiki I see that:

IMPORTANT: The ZCS release you install on the 64-bit server must be the same release as installed on the 32-bit server. The server can have a different operating system.

I thought that we could migrate our Mac servers installation from ZCS 5 to ZCS 6, then migrate ZCS 6 to a new Ubuntu 10.04 server and finally upgrade it to ZCS 7.1, but so far I see that the latest ZCS release for Mac OS X 10.5 is 6.0.7 while the first available release for Ubuntu 10.04 is 6.0.8 ... no common ZCS version between the old and new OSes.
Could we ignore the warning and follow this migration path:

• on the old Mac OS 10.5 servers:

• upgrade ZCS 5.0.22 > ZCS 6.0.7
• apply zcs-patch-6.0.7_GA_2476

• on the new Ubuntu 10.04 servers:

• clean install of ZCS 6.0.8
• apply zcs-patch-6.0.8_GA_2685
• copy the existing data from ZCS 6.0.7_Mac to ZCS 6.0.8_Ubuntu
• upgrade ZCS 6.0.8 > ZCS 7.1.0

or we will end up with a messed up, non working mail server?
Any suggestion?

[fab]

I truly appreciate that my post has been "migrated" from the "Migrations" to the "Administrators" forum, but what I need is an answer to my server-to-server migration issues.
:-)

[remzon]

Fab, we have the same concern. Do you have answer on this already? Thanks for posting your query.

[fab]

Someone from the Zimbra staff contacted me by email but still no answer apart from a "there is no support on the OSS version".
BTW, looking into the ZCS installation scripts I have seen that during an upgrade install zmsetup.pl calls a series of upgrade functions until the data of the previous ZCS installation is upgraded to the current version; now, 'upgrade607GA' is among these functions and I guess that the trick is either to edit .install_history or to create a customized version of zmsetup.pl to force it to call upgrade607GA() and upgrade the ZCS 6.0.7 data to version 6.0.8 on the new Ubuntu10 servers (this is just before the final step I was hypothesizing in my migration path above).
Doing so the data and binaries would be properly 'synchronized' on the ZCS 6.0.8 installation running on Ubuntu 10.04, therefore we will be able to safely upgrade it to ZCS 7.1 at the end.

[jimcjohnston]

Fab,
We also have the same issue. We are using Network Edition 5.0.23 on OSX, trying to get to version 7 on Ubuntu 10 in VMWare. Trying to figure out what path we should take to get there.
Have you tried anything yet? Any success or failure?
We were thinking of going to 5.0.23 on Ubuntu 8 and then trying to go up from there, not sure where to make the transition from 5 to 6 an 6 to 7 and from OSX to Ubuntu 8 and then 10. Whatever, it looks like a tedious process.
Any suggestions or ideas would help.

[fab]

Just to inform whoever may be interested that we have finally and successfully updated or ZCS install from ZCS 5.0.22 on Mac OS X 10.5 to ZCS 7.1.4 on Ubuntu 10.04_LTS x64.
Of course some planning and pre-migration testing on a pair of virtual machines is necessary, but once I had laid out my migration plan everything worked fine.

[Crayz9000]

Originally Posted by fab

Just to inform whoever may be interested that we have finally and successfully updated or ZCS install from ZCS 5.0.22 on Mac OS X 10.5 to ZCS 7.1.4 on Ubuntu 10.04_LTS x64.
Of course some planning and pre-migration testing on a pair of virtual machines is necessary, but once I had laid out my migration plan everything worked fine.

Good to hear that I wasn't the only one who went through that. Hell of a migration. I don't suppose you might have any comments or corrections on the notes I posted on the Wiki? Crayz9000-Notes - Zimbra :: Wiki

[fab]

The migration steps in your notes are similar to mine, except that I came from zcs5 and I had to perform a more extensive binary files replacement (your "replace binaries" section).
I didn't know about the rrd files to remove, maybe they are the reason why zmstat shows absolutely nothing on the admin console of my zcs7.1 servers.
BTW I hope that in the next few days I will have the time to rewrite my migration notes in a most clear form and publish them in my notes wiki so that we can compare mine with yours and other (unlucky) OS X users would eventually find a clear guide to migrate their zcs installation.

[fab]

I have then verified and it's true that removing the rrd files coming from the old Zimbra installation has fixed the "Server status unavailable" and no graphs in admin console server statistics.
Added a specific entry about this in my migration notes, they are almost ready and I should be able to post them today.

[fab]

My migration notes can be found here:
http://ww2.unime.it/flr/zimbra/mignotes.html
After I wrote and formatted them in html I don't have the time/wish to reformat the whole thing using the Wiki editor.