Zimbra has released Zimbra 7 for about a month and it seems quite stable for production use. As major upgrade to Zimbra 6, Zimbra 7 comes with tons of bug fixes and new features including security feature to prevent virus and spam.
Does the upgrade process should be applied for production use ? The answer depends on your environment. If an existing system quite stable with minor problem, you may stick with your existing Zimbra system but if you need some features that only provided by Zimbra 7, upgrading may be the best option. I’m currently manages some Zimbra for production mail server system on some client, most of them are corporate with user 100-10k users.
If you wish to upgrading Zimbra 6.x.x into Zimbra 7.x.x, below are some notes to make upgrading process works successfully. Upgrade process took about 30 minutes on system with 8 GB of RAM
- Full Backup. Backup is a must, especially for major upgrade from Zimbra 6 to Zimbra 7. Backup all your /opt/zimbra to a backup media. It’s a preventive tasks, as an emergency option in case upgrade process doesn’t work as expected.
- Write a Notes for Custom Modification. Upgrading process will remove all custom modification to Zimbra system, including DomainKeys/DKIM, PolicyD, Postfix Restrict Recipient, RBL override, custome Postfix tweaks, etc
- Download & Read Release Notes Carefully. Release notes can be obtained from : http://www.zimbra.com/downloads/os-downloads.html. Read it carefully, especially for pre, on and post install tips.
- Update MySQL Database. Zimbra bypassing this process because this process will took a much longer time, depending MySQL database size. Although the bypass process will not messed up email sending and receiving, Zimbra will issued an error for database integrity report as below :
Database errors found. /opt/zimbra/mysql/bin/mysqlcheck --defaults-file=/opt/zimbra/conf/my.cnf -S /opt/zimbra/db/mysql.sock -A -C -s -u root --password=XtfabvSktqwZBQKFU5J.vAJ8QQUpssqi mboxgroup1.appointment error : Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `appointment`" or dump/reload to fix it! mboxgroup1.data_source_item error : Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `data_source_item`" or dump/reload to fix it! mboxgroup1.imap_folder error : Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `imap_folder`" or dump/reload to fix it! mboxgroup1.mail_item error : Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `mail_item`" or dump/reload to fix it! mboxgroup1.pop3_message error : Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `pop3_message`" or dump/reload to fix it!
To resolve this problem, run following command from konsole/terminal :
/opt/zimbra/libexec/scripts/migrate20100913-Mysql51.pl
The above command will invoke Zimbra to updating MySQL database from Zimbra 6.x.x database schema
- Optional : Authorizing Zimbra MTA. If your Zimbra server could not send an email after upgrade, run the following command :
sudo /opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov –m –l yourZimbra.server.com zimbraMtaAuthHost yourZimbra.server.com
Note : the above command are optional, you do not need to execute the command if your Zimbra server doesn’t have any problem for sending and receiving email.
Fully tested upgrading Zimbra 6.0.10 to Zimbra 7.1.0 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 64 bit.
