Time Required for 5.0 Upgrade

[peng1can]

Anyone done an upgrade of 4.5->5.0 on a large deployment (I'm at 7500 mailboxes) and can give me a hint as to how long the upgrade will take? I've heard only that the database upgrade can take "quite a while" but can anyone say if that's 20 minutes, 2 hours, 12 hours, etc?

[brian]

Internally we test upgrade timings between major versions with 10k users and 1000 mailbox items per user.

Between 4.5.5_GA to 5.0.0_GA this test came out to about 42mins.

Hope that helps.

[fcash]

I think it really depends on the speed of the server, especially CPU speed, since a lot of the process is done in Java.

Our upgrade from 5.0R C2 to 5.0 GA with only 12 users and 3 GB of mail took almost an hour. But, this is on a lowly dual-P3 1 GHz box with 4 GB RAM and only 2 80 GB HD in a software RAID1.

[brian]

Actually the bulk of the upgrade time is usually spent in schema migrations and rebuilding the slapd indexes. These are almost exclusively IO bound processes. So faster and more disks almost always speed this up.

The particular test was performed on a Quad 2.66 Xeon with 8GB RAM and 4 HW RAID1 volumes /opt/zimbra, /opt/zimbra/db, /opt/zimbra/index and /opt/zimbra/store.

Certainly a Intel P3 with software raid is going to be CPU bound, but this box is probably just fine for 12 users.
-bp

[peng1can]

With 7500 users on an 2x dual-core Xeon w/8GB attached to a DS4400 SAN, it took us closer to 2.5 hours (including the db integrity check) for the migration (4.6 to 5.0), if anyone is interested in the data point.

[fcash]

Originally Posted by brian

Actually the bulk of the upgrade time is usually spent in schema migrations and rebuilding the slapd indexes. These are almost exclusively IO bound processes. So faster and more disks almost always speed this up.

That could be. I had top running in a virtual terminal during the process, and the times I looked over at it always showed a java process at >= 86% CPU. Not scientific in the least, just what I saw.

Certainly a Intel P3 with software raid is going to be CPU bound, but this box is probably just fine for 12 users.
-bp

It's a temp box while we evaluate/test Zimbra. The server that will be its eventual home is a dual-Opteron box with 8 GB RAM and 12x 400 GB HD in RAID5. Zimbra will hopefully be running in a Xen VM on this box.