Upgrade Zimbra 7.2 on Ubuntu 8.04 to Zimbra 8 on Ubuntu 12.04

Hi

I wondering whats the best way to upgrade my zimbra 7.2 ubuntu 8.04 64bit installation to
zimbra 8 ubuntu 12.04?

1. Upgrade to ubuntu 10.04
2. Upgrade to zimbra 8
3. Upgrade to ubuntu 12.04 ?

thanks for your ideas

I would have thought to upgrade the system before upgrading the mail application.
Why would you want to do upgrade Zimbra in the midle of your system upgrade?

the problem is, zimbra 7 does not support ubuntu 12.04 and zimbra 8 does not support ubuntu 8.04 and ubuntu 10.04 is supported by both, and I thought it would be a good thing to have a working zimbra 7 for the upgrade process.

I tried it on a test setup and it went mostly smooth:
* make a full backup
* disabled Zimbra autostart
* upgrade Ubuntu to 12.04 - Zimbra 7.2 stops working after that!
* run the Zimbra 8 upgrade

When you start the upgrade the LDAP and MySQL servers are not running, so tell it not to check the database. Also, since LDAP is not running, it can't find the Zimbra license (if you are on NE), so have the license file around and point the installer to it.
Everything worked after that...

Do you use the same license file that you did in 7 or did you need a different license xml file for 8? Thanks

I want to share my experience about upgrading my ZCS OSE 7.2.0 (on Ubuntu 10.04 of course) to ZCS OSE 8.0.0 (on Ubuntu 12.04 of course).
First I backed up /opt/zimbra folder on Ubuntu 10.04. I stopped the server (I am using virtual machines on VMware; so it is easy to do this).
I created a new server which has Ubuntu 12.04 as OS on it. And I gave the same IP and the same host name to the new server as the stopped one.
I dowloaded ZCS OSE 8.0.0 from zimbra.com. And I unpacked it somewhere under /home folder (lets call it /home/download/zcs).
I installed the software by running /home/download/zcs/install.sh -s as root. -s option tells the installer not to configure ZCS after installation (because we will use the configuration parameters and files of the saved one on Ubuntu 10.04).
I stopped all zimbra services using su - zimbra -c"/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol stop" command.
If you want, you can check if any (orphaned) zimbra service is still active using su - zimbra -c"/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol status" command.
If you see still active zimbra services you can kill them using ORPHANED=`ps -u zimbra -o "pid="` && kill -9 $ORPHANED commands.
I removed the newly created /opt/zimbra folder by running rm -rf /opt/zimbra as root.
Then I restored the backed up the /opt/zimbra folder usinf rsync command. By the way rsync is the most safe and quick way of incremental back up and restore process for later operations.
Not to face any OS specific permission problems, I ran /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmfixperms -extended.
Then I ran /home/download/zcs/install.sh (this time without -s option).
I told the installer not to check the database for integrity (because mysql did not run at that time).
The installer did the rest.
Now I am using the upgraded version.
And after seeing the new server works, I no longer needed my old server. So I removed it.
As you can see, the upgrade process is not different than moving your ZCS to another (twin) server.
Best regards.

Hello:
I am in the same situation and the otherts feedback is very helpfull. I think this information can be helpfull too

Ajcody-Notes-OS-Upgrade-And-ZCS-Options - Zimbra :: Wiki

I am gonna do the experiment and see how it goes but i think is a process very straigh forward.