Upgrading time estimate for 130G of email

[skout23]

So I need to upgrade from 4.5.5 to 4.5.6, and have a data-store of over 130G of emails on about 250 accounts. I know in the docs it mentions taking about an hour to process 400 users with 1000 emails each, but does the size of the email body matter, or is it all based on header info? Just want an estimate of how long I need to schedule an outage for. It took over a week to imapcopy/imapsync the old emails during install/migration. I can't take that long again for an upgrade.

Thanks,
Scott

[mmorse]

The mail itself isn't processed during upgrades, essentially it's however long it takes you to do a backup of your /opt/zimbra and any linked directories.

[skout23]

My concern arose from a line in the release note for 4.5.6, which stated:

http://www.zimbra.com/pdf/Zimbra%20O...se%20Notes.pdf

"Note: In our testing for 4.0.x to 4.5, upgrading 4000 users with 1000
messages and using two disks for mySQL took approximately 55 minutes
to complete. This time can vary depending on the size of user mailboxes."

Was this only for 4.0 to 4.5 upgrades?

Thanks,
Scott

[mmorse]

I know in the docs it mentions taking about an hour to process 400 users with 1000 emails each,

(it's 4k users in the doc)
400 is a little different than 4,000
you have 250users (regardless of mailbox size) I wouldn't sweat it too much
server specs?
I've always found that the backup (of everything) is the longest part of upgrade processes

[skout23]

While I do appreciate your replies, I still feel I need some clarification. The "4000 users with 1000 emails each" is not very descriptive, are they sample emails, or actual live data? This data could easily be less than 3 Gigs in size or could be as large of a data store if not more than my 130 Gigs, and as it states that the size of the mailbox is directly related to the length of time it takes to complete the process, it would be nice to know some hard numbers. Such as "It took 3 hours to upgrade our server with 10 Gigs of emails". It would be unacceptable to call an outage for 2 hours and then it take 10 or more to complete.

Specs:
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
2.6Ghz Duo
4gigs of memory
hardware mirrored /opt partition

Thanks,
Scott

[soxfan]

I'll give you the information on my 4.5.5 to 4.5.6 upgrade, but I won't guarantee that you can extrapolate it out to your environment. I did the upgrade at the beginning of this month, just after it came out. At that time I had around 225 active users, with around 60 GB of email. My hardware specs are comparable to yours. The upgrade itself took well under an hour; probably more like 20 minutes or so. As Mmorse said, depending on how you do your backups this is where you could add some significant downtime.

HTH,
John

[skout23]

Great! That is what I was looking for.

Thanks,
Scott

[mmorse]

sry, editing I seemed to have cut out what I mentioned on mailbox sizes.

Don't forget the all important restore time in case *cross fingers* you need to restore:

Backup transfer time (unique to everyone/largely dependent on mail store sizes)
+ Upgrade time (< 30 min probably) -time it and let us know
+ Configuration time (any custom config files you need to re-add/edit, skins, etc)
+ Emergency restore time (reverse of backup)

[randall]

While I do appreciate your replies, I still feel I need some clarification. The "4000 users with 1000 emails each" is not very descriptive, are they sample emails, or actual live data? This data could easily be less than 3 Gigs in size or could be as large of a data store if not more than my 130 Gigs, and as it states that the size of the mailbox is directly related to the length of time it takes to complete the process, it would be nice to know some hard numbers. Such as "It took 3 hours to upgrade our server with 10 Gigs of emails". It would be unacceptable to call an outage for 2 hours and then it take 10 or more to complete.

Specs:
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
2.6Ghz Duo
4gigs of memory
hardware mirrored /opt partition

Thanks,
Scott

Also, as i understand and from my experience in upgrading (we have the same setup), we only need to back up the /opt/zimbra in case things screw-up. but if everything goes on normally, it would only take you to upgrade from 4.5.5 to 4.5.6 about 20-30 mins..

hope this helps.

[jholder]

So I need to upgrade from 4.5.5 to 4.5.6, and have a data-store of over 130G of emails on about 250 accounts. I know in the docs it mentions taking about an hour to process 400 users with 1000 emails each, but does the size of the email body matter, or is it all based on header info? Just want an estimate of how long I need to schedule an outage for. It took over a week to imapcopy/imapsync the old emails during install/migration. I can't take that long again for an upgrade.

Thanks,
Scott

About 20 minutes.

We don't typically change db schema's in "dot releases".
When we do, is when it can take longer.