Re: migration to multi-host environment

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

----- "Daryl Campbell" <daryl@athabascau.ca> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Has anyone experimented with a migration from a single machine
> zimbra setup to a multi-host environment?

We moved from a "prepilot" implementation on a single machine to our "pilot" which was set up on several machines. Here were the general steps:

- prepilot was "@zimbra.sfu.ca"
- pilot was "@sfu.ca"
- pilot was installed from scratch on 3 servers - 1 did mta/proxy/ldap while the other two were dedicated mailbox servers
- To do the actual data migration, we:
  - shut off access to prepilot
  - upgraded prepilot so it was at same version as pilot (5.0.2 -> 5.0.6 I think)
  - ran a zimbra backup for all prepilot users, storing the backups on an NFS volume
  - added "@zimbra.sfu.ca" to our pilot as a second domain
  - mounted the NFS backup volume on the pilot mailbox1 server
  - restored individual users who had chosen to retain their prepilot data
  - renamed restored users from user@zimbra.sfu.ca to user@sfu.ca

The transition was pretty much flawless - the only thing I can't remember off the top of my head is whether shared folders and permissions migrated. I seem to remember not.

> We had thought about following the Zimbra docs "Disaster
> Recovery" steps but what concerned us was this may work
> for data migration but does it capture all the Zimbra
> configuration.

Our "prepilot" environment wasn't treated as our final configuration, so when we built the pilot, we started from scratch and built it as though it would eventually become our production system (which it did). As such, we didn't care about migrating individual settings over. Plus, our prepilot was the FOSS version, whereas pilot was NE, so the feature set was different.

That said, I don't think it took more than a couple of hours to review all of the settings in the Admin console and set them the way we wanted in the pilot environment

-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University