Good Evening!
I've been tasked with a combination migration/upgrade of a multi-server Zimbra system. When I posted some of the details of where we are and where we want to go on the Zimbra forums, one of the moderators suggested using your migration method. We're currently running a 4 server ZCS 7.2.2 NE system (1 x ldap, 2 x mta, 1 x mailbox) on SLES 11 running natively on HP servers, and we want to migrate to a 3 server ZCS 8.0.7 NE system (1 x proxy, 2 x ldap/mta/mailbox) on Ubuntu 12.04.4LTS running on vSphere 5.5 VMs. I keep running into serious problems (proxy configuration not working, and now zmmailboxmove barfing...) I've already opened 2 support tickets with Zimbra while we're still in the pilot phase!
Will Zextras allow us to migrate to a different server set up? What I mean is that we're currently on a 4 server configuration on ZCS 7.2.2 NE, running on SLES 11, 1 x ldap, 2 x mta, 1 x mailbox, all running on HP servers. The mailbox server is 8Gb FC multipath connected to an EMC CX3-40 array.
We're looking to migrate to a 3 server ZCS 8.0.7 (or newer) NE, running on Ubuntu 12.04.4LTS vSphere 5.5 VMs, connected by 10Gb iSCSI to a Nimble array. Two servers would be mutli-role, ldap/mta/mailbox, with the third server being a proxy.
From the URL the moderator responded to me with, it appears that ZeXtras will back up the existing system, and from there, the import utility will populate the new system. It looks like it will allow individual domains to be relocated, if need be, which could be useful to us, as our Zimbra system currently hosts 10 active domains. We've got just shy of 1500 users, and our Zimbra mail/message/db stores hold about 600GB (not counting backups).
One of the issues we need to overcome is the simple fact that a catastrophic failure of our Zimbra system as it is now could take our mail system down for as long as 72 hours, so we want to get into a vSphere environment that will help limit the possibility of a hardware failure. We will also spread the users out over 2 mailbox servers, which will hopefully increase performance, while reducing the time a total restore of the mail system would take. We'll also be replicating the VM data to our "hot site" where we should be able to bring up our backup system should our main site go down completely.
I guess my questions are:
1) Will the import facility of ZeXtras "take care of" the object and schema changes when it imports the old zimbra system (v7) into the new system (v8)
2) Will ZeXtras allow us to determine which mailbox servers in the new system will host individual users?
3) Could a migration of this scale occur on a single Sunday, or will something of this scale take a few days. And if so, can it be done as a "rolling migration?"
Thanks for your time.
Mark