centos 5.2 upgrade

[Artturi]

Hello,

We use Zimbra 0E on centos 5.2.

I'd like to upgrade to centos 5.3 by doing a "yum upgrade" but wonder if this is risky or not. I suppose I'll get a new kernel so I expect a reboot. Besides, is there anything else to expect ?

Regards,

Artturi

[uxbod]

Upgraded fine here without any issues

[root@office conf]# rpm -qa | grep -i centos-release
centos-release-5-4.el5.centos.1

Just plan to shutdown ZCS and take a backup prior to upgrading CentOS.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by Artturi

I'd like to upgrade to centos 5.3 by doing a "yum upgrade" but wonder if this is risky or not. I suppose I'll get a new kernel so I expect a reboot. Besides, is there anything else to expect ?

What you can expect is to get CentOS 5.4 as that's the current version.

[deepblue]

Originally Posted by Artturi

Hello,

We use Zimbra 0E on centos 5.2.

I'd like to upgrade to centos 5.3 by doing a "yum upgrade" but wonder if this is risky or not. I suppose I'll get a new kernel so I expect a reboot. Besides, is there anything else to expect ?

Regards,

Artturi

I usually combine a Zimbra upgrade with a "yum update" of the server. I shutdown zimbra before the yum update and reboot after all packages have been updated.
Then I start the Zimbra update.

I never experienced any problems after Centos updates.

Regards
Thomas

[ashleydrees]

I am pretty new to Zimbra having just inherited the machine, as a Linux admin i am not phased by the install just do not want too much down time.

I want to move from CentOS 4.x to CentOS 5.x and then ZCS 5.x to ZCS 6.x, i can easily do the CentOS side of things, but worry about how much down time to upgrade and if there are any obvious gotchas for a ZCS newbie.

Is there a readme somone can point me at, or some other online or offline info.

I AM still looking.

[deepblue]

Originally Posted by ashleydrees

I am pretty new to Zimbra having just inherited the machine, as a Linux admin i am not phased by the install just do not want too much down time.

I want to move from CentOS 4.x to CentOS 5.x and then ZCS 5.x to ZCS 6.x, i can easily do the CentOS side of things, but worry about how much down time to upgrade and if there are any obvious gotchas for a ZCS newbie.

Is there a readme somone can point me at, or some other online or offline info.

I AM still looking.

Hi ashleydrees,

You should do the OS Update and the Zimbra Update in 2 different steps. I would recommend, to do the OS update first. The problem is, that you can not run ZCS for RHEL/CentOS 4 o an RHEL/CentOS 5 Sytstem. You have to change/update the ZCS Version after updating the OS.

The following Blog describes a similar migration scenario:
Moving ZCS to Another Server » Zimbra :: Blog

There is another BLOG or document (which I can not find at the moment), that describes you migration path in more detail...

Regards
Thomas

[soxfan]

Are you planning to do an in-place upgrade of the OS (ie stay on the same server)? Personally, I wouldn't recommend this. Not because of any bad experiences I've had; just in general I like fresh OS installs on servers.

As far as the Zimbra upgrade from you shouldn't really have any issues there. I recently did an upgrade from version 5 to 6 and it took about an hour (I skipped the database check). Obviously make sure you have a good backup prior to attempting the upgrade. Check the release notes on version 6 -- there may be a recommended intermediate upgrade on the version 5 side of things.

If you are planning on moving to a new server you must install the same version of Zimbra on your new server as you are running on your current server. So, in your scenario you would either upgrade your existing Zimbra install to version 6 (6.0.5 or whatever the latest is when you actually upgrade) and then migrate to the new server running CentOS 5. Or migrate to the new CentOS 5 server and install the same version of Zimbra 5 you are currently running. Then upgrade to Zimbra 6 after you are up and running. Check the wiki and forums for info on this type of migration/upgrade.

Also, just want to point out something since you say you inherited the admin of your Zimbra server. Your profile shows you are running the Network version of Zimbra. You do realize that this is not an "officially" supported OS, right? (Although a lot users feel it should be -- bug 23487)

[ashleydrees]

Thanks Thomas and Soxfan.

I did not realise that we had a non supported OS installation, i have read the bug 23487, hope CentOS gets approved and i also did not realise that Zimbra now belongs to VMWare... i am pretty happy about the vmware side of things and i am a bit worried about the CentOS side of things - At this site we have practiaclly no budget and only have one low spec server, so it is an inplace upgrade i fear.. though i personaly like a clean server for a major upgrade.

The migration doc is helpful, and indeed i might do that as i would really like a clean OS to work from - i notice that Ubuntu is supported by the Network edition, and i like Ubuntu, so i might just back the whole thing up and migrate to Ubuntu 8.x

[soxfan]

*** Disclaimer *** -- The following is just my own personal opinion.

I wouldn't worry too much about running on CentOS. A LOT of people here in the forums (including myself) run under CentOS. Of course I'm running the FOSS version, but I know there are several installs running the Network Edition under CentOS as well (including at least one moderator -- it's in his profile). If you are familiar with Linux you probably know that CentOS essentially IS an "un-branded" version of RHEL. I think the reason it is not officially supported has more to do with things of the political / business nature than anything else. I just wanted to point it out because if you are going to tackle the upgrade / migration and you run into issues where you want to call support you may run into some resistance. (Other NE / CentOS users/admin can probably speak better to this point.)

As far as your OS upgrade, I suppose you could backup your Zimbra installation (double and even triple checking that you've got a good backup) then wipe out your CentOS 4 and do a fresh install of CentOS 5. You can probably find several posts here and elsewhere of people who did in-place OS upgrades and had no problems. I'm just not comfortable with it myself.