Hello All,
I'm a long-time ZCS Open Source admin / user. In fact, I've been a moderator on the Zimbra forums since nearly the beginning, although I must admit I've been pretty inactive for quite awhile. Anyway, I used to keep fairly current with new Zimbra releases, but for various reasons I haven't done any Zimbra or OS upgrades on my server for quite some time. I am currently running ZCS 7.2.2 FOSS version on a CentOS 5.4 system. I'm considering upgrading and since RHEL / CentOS 5.x is getting old and no longer supported for ZCS I would like to move to a new server running a more current OS. I think the ZeXtras Migration Tool may be very helpful for this, but I have several questions:
1) As I said, my current Zimbra system is running CentOS 5.4 (64-bit). Will there be any issues running the Migration Tool on this OS? I don't see CentOS 5 on the Compatibility List, although this seems to be more for the import than the export.
2) Are there any plans to support ZCS 8.5 and/or RHEL / CentOS 7.x?
3) My goal would be for the new server to have the same host-name and IP address of the existing server. Basically replacing the current server with the new server, and from the user standpoint nothing really changes (except new version of Zimbra). What are the recommendations for preparing the new server for this type of migration? Do I install ZCS and set it up with a temporary / dummy domain?
4) If I'm reading correctly, I need enough disk space to backup my current Zimbra environment and restore the info on the new server. So essentially I will need twice as much free disk space as my current installation. Is it basically a 1:1 relationship for current space used to backed up data to restored data?
5) I know there are a lot of factors that come into play, but is there any way to guesstimate the amount of time the migration will take? I'm running in a VMware 5.1 environment. The current server is a VM and the new server will be a VM as well. We currently have around 345 GB of Zimbra data. Ideally I would hope to present a new disk to the current server for the export and then take it away and present it to the new server for the import. So, no copying over the network would be involved. I've briefly looked at the Incremental Migration process, but would like to keep things as simple as possible. Since all our external email comes into an email anti-spam / anti-virus gateway first, I can schedule some off-hours downtime without fear of losing any email.
I may not do this migration for quite some time, but never too early to start preparing. If there are any other things I should consider, beyond what I've listed here, any info, tips, pointers, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
John