Migrating Zarafa 7.0 & 7.1 Licenced servers to Kopano Core on new servers

chojin

Hello,

First of all, a little background.

I inherited a bunch of old Zarafa 7.0 & 7.1 Licenced servers running on old Debian servers:

7.0.15 on Debian 6 (Physical) (~50 users)
7.1.7 on Debian 7 (Physical) (~60 users)
7.1.11 on Debian 6 (Proxmox VM) (~40 users)

The hardware was about to fail on the physical servers so I did a P2V to have them working on a Proxmox hypervisor, and enabled daily snapshots to be on the safe side.

All 3 of them are synchronized with their respective company’s Windows Active Directory

They still work mostly fine to this day, but needless to say, these servers need to be retired and replaced with a new distribution.

With the new Kopano Core 8.7.12.0 finally available on Debian 10 I think it is the good time to try and plan these migrations.

The catch is that I have to minimize the downtime of each server to the max, as these mail systems are being massively used, even more now with the ongoing pandemic.

I have no problem installing a Debian 10 and Kopano Core + Webapp “base” server, but after this I am a bit lost as to what would be the best plan to carry on.

I thought that maybe I could add the Kopano Core server as an additional server, have it manage new users, while I migrate them by batch from the old server to the new one, and finally remove the old server and point the MX to the new server. But is that a relevant/doable method? Does it require Postfix wizardry?

Maybe there is a magical way to migrate all users/db/attachments/settings over a weekend (this downtime would be acceptable), but I read here and there that Zarafa had to be 7.2.x for such migration to occur seamlessly. And I would like to avoid the extra step of upgrading to 7.2 (if possible), considering that I have 3 organizations to deal with.

I am open to suggestions, advices, recommendations, magic tricks :)

Kind regards.

fbartels

@chojin said in Migrating Zarafa 7.0 & 7.1 Licenced servers to Kopano Core on new servers:

Maybe there is a magical way to migrate all users/db/attachments/settings over a weekend (this downtime would be acceptable)

Depending on the total amount of data a migration over a weekend should be no problem at all. You could already migrate the mysql database beforehand with a master/slave replication and copy the majority of attachments as well.

Coming from these early versions, though you need to once start the database with for example 8.4.5 (see https://kb.kopano.io/display/WIKI/Migrating+from+ZCP+7.1+or+earlier+to+Kopano+Core+8.5+or+later). The 8.4.5 server binary could be provided through a small docker container.

If you need help planning your migration I am sure this can be arranged.