Migrating to Zimbra Appliance?

I'm not sure of the reasons for everyone to move to the Appliance (though I've read you seem to have some various reasons for doing so), but I would certainly suggest holding off for now. We do not yet have verified documentation on the process for completing such a move. One thing that could potentially help you would be making sure you're at least on ZCS 7.1.4 before doing so. If you're on 7.1.4 or above, in theory you should be able to bring up a new appliance running zcs8 as a mailstore, and then using zmmboxmove to move your mailboxes to the new platform. Once that's done, it gets a bit tricky. Since you need to then eventually shut down your old system, you're going to need to be able to transfer mta, ldap, and potentially proxy to the new host. In order to do that, you'll need to upgrade the old box to 8 first, and then bring up the appliance as a replica and mta (and possibly proxy) server as well. Additionally, it should be noted that you're going to hit Bug 77669 and Bug 77597, and there's no way around that. All single-instance storage will be lost, with no current ability to reclaim it. What that does to your storage considerations is not easily determined, but if you have a lot of single-instance storage, that could be a considerable hit on disk usage.

Documentation for these procedures is currently being worked on, but I don't yet know when it will be available. I would suggest holding off on any moves to Appliance until that has been released though, since you could run into a big mess if you start and end up stuck somewhere along the line.

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Originally Posted by tonster

I'm not sure of the reasons for everyone to move to the Appliance (though I've read you seem to have some various reasons for doing so), but I would certainly suggest holding off for now.

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We're migrating off of old hardware to a completely virtual environment. I see advantages in the Appliance. I don't think importing the existing physical hosts into VMs is possible because of the amount of storage on the physical hosts. Our current physical hosts have performance issues...too many accounts per host. We're going to be splitting the existing accounts across many more(double at least) mailbox VMs to lessen the load on each mailbox.

I don't think I have a straight upgrade path....I have to do a migration/upgrade of some kind. But I see the issue you are referring to in your Bugzilla links. Migrations will lose deduplication and could drastically increase storage requirements.

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Originally Posted by tonster

We do not yet have verified documentation on the process for completing such a move. One thing that could potentially help you would be making sure you're at least on ZCS 7.1.4 before doing so. If you're on 7.1.4 or above, in theory you should be able to bring up a new appliance running zcs8 as a mailstore, and then using zmmboxmove to move your mailboxes to the new platform.

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Since I'm still at 7.1.3....it looks like I have to upgrade to 7.1.4 or the 7.2.x branch first then.....and I was trying to avoid another upgrade of the existing cluster. Do you recommend one branch over the other? If I have to do the upgrade anyway should I just make the jump in the existing cluster to 8.0?

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Originally Posted by tonster

Once that's done, it gets a bit tricky. Since you need to then eventually shut down your old system, you're going to need to be able to transfer mta, ldap, and potentially proxy to the new host. In order to do that, you'll need to upgrade the old box to 8 first, and then bring up the appliance as a replica and mta (and possibly proxy) server as well. Additionally, it should be noted that you're going to hit Bug 77669 and Bug 77597, and there's no way around that. All single-instance storage will be lost, with no current ability to reclaim it. What that does to your storage considerations is not easily determined, but if you have a lot of single-instance storage, that could be a considerable hit on disk usage.

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A rolling upgrade as I described up above? I knew I would have to upgrade at least the LDAPs and MTAs first....

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Originally Posted by tonster

Documentation for these procedures is currently being worked on, but I don't yet know when it will be available. I would suggest holding off on any moves to Appliance until that has been released though, since you could run into a big mess if you start and end up stuck somewhere along the line.

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The sooner the better. We are running into performance issues because our physical hosts can no longer easily handle the usage during peak loads. We also are nearing capacity on our existing storage. It's a great time to do something new. :)

Thanks for the info...

Matt

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Originally Posted by bgszim

Same mission here:

Got a Zimbra Network Edition 7.20 on Centos 5. I'm thinking about moving to the Zimbra Appliance when i will do the update to zimbra 8. So basically this would mean:

1) Set up Zimbra Network Edition 7.20 on a Ubuntu
2) Moving Data to this Server
3) Inplace Update to Zimbra 8 on this Ubuntu
4) Migration somehow to Zimbra Appliance

Pretty time consuming....I wonder why it isnt possible to simply set up a Zimbra 8 Appliance and then make a restore of all the Mailboxes from the Zimbra 7.2 Network Edition Backup...

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For smaller environments, this is entirely possible to backup and restore all accounts to the ZCS8 appliance. Please the wiki page for more information on using this method.

Cheers,