faultline's picture

Hello, everyone.

I have a client running the Turnkey Zimbra appliance, and they have asked me to look into possibly upgrading them to Zimbra version 7.  I wonder if anyone here has successfully upgraded the appliance.

I have already done Zimbra 6 to version 7 upgrades on other machines, but I don't know what may be different in the Turnkey appliance.

Thank you in advance for helping me out.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Although I have no idea how much pain would be involved.

I suggest you create a clone of the appliance (TKLBAM will probably be the easiest way to go*) and running it as a VM do a dry run. If you carefully document the steps you take and solutions to any issues you encounter you will be able to repeat the steps on the appliance.

Another thing that may (or may not) be a better way to go is to update a clean install of the appliance to Zimbra v7.x and migrate all the data from the old appliance.

Either way I strongly recommend testing the process in a virtual environment first to reduce the likelihood of issues for your client. Also (as you'd probably already do) make sure you backup everything prior to working on the current appliance (just in case - even if you have perfected the technique something could go wrong).

Be great if you post back here with your experiences (and dev notes of your upgrade) regardless of how it goes.

Good luck :)

*TKLBAM does not currently support Zimbra

Rick's picture

I upgraded mine on Friday to Version 7.  Seems to be working like a charm.  There were a bunch of speed bumps though, but I was able to get it upgraded.  I actually went from 5-6 and then 6-7.  Not sure if that is completely necessary.  I had to follow the steps from like 5 different posts on here.  I will re-post later on with the main link from here that I followed in order to get things rolling.

Jeremy Davis's picture

The hold up with an updated Zimbra appliance has been a 64 bit TKL base for it (Zimbra 7 is only supported on 64 bit Ubuntu). I don't expect TKL to release 64 bit appliances at this late stage of the v11.x cycle. The v12.x release will rebase off Ubuntu v12.04 so I would anticipate a new Zimbra appliance to be included in the v12.x appliance lineup release sometime after April 2012 (soon after hopefully).

Jeremy Davis's picture

AFAIK TKL devs still plan to release an updated Zimbra appliance. Also AFAIK 64 bit appliances will be the default for TKL v12.x.

Ubuntu 12.04/Precise releases in 2 weeks so hopefully sometime really soon after that we will see a TKL Ubuntu-based Core v12.0RC. Once that has been tested a little by the community (and has no glaringly obvious bugs left) the stable will be released with all of the existing appliances updated (I would assume including Zimbra).

So my guess is that in the best case scenario we'll see a v12.0 Zimbra7 appliance minimum 6wks away (ie end of May - although may be longer than that).

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