Zimbra to Zimbra migration using Zextras and SSHFS

January 13, 2017 - Reading time: 6 minutes

This is only an extension to a normal installation. So you should have your new Zimbra environment ready to move the data of your current Zimbra environment to it.

In the past we did an in-place upgrade of our Zimbra and the Ubuntu it was residing on. The last upgrade from 8.5.1 on Ubuntu 14.04 to 8.7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 was such a drama that I started looking for an easier solution that would give me a fresh Zimbra with all my settings, accounts, mails, calendar items ... without too much fuss.

To prevent inconsistency please stop your old Zimbra and afterwards make a snapshot and/or backup before you continue.

/etc/init.d/zimbra stop

OR

su - zimbra -c "zmcontrol stop"

Also stop and disable fetchmail if you're using it

/etc/init.d/fetchmail stop 
sed -i "s/START_DAEMON=yes/START_DAEMON=no/g" /etc/default/fetchmail

Next change the IP because the Zimbra will need to be started again to do the export

sed -i "s/old_ip/temporary_ip/g" /etc/hosts /etc/network/interfaces
reboot

Next on both Zimbras create a folder to store the migration data on

su - zimbra -c "mkdir /opt/zimbra/backup/exports /opt/zimbra/backup/zextras"

Next mount this folder as the user zimbra on the new Zimbra (don't set a password on the zimbra user, just create a key pair and share the SSH public key). This will save you time to move the data.

 sshfs zimbra@temporary_ip:/opt/zimbra/backup/exports/ /opt/zimbra/backup/exports/

Next install the migration tool on the old Zimbra

cd /tmp && wget https://download.zextras.com/zextras_migration_tool-latest.tgz
tar xvzf zextras_migration_tool-*.tgz
cd zextras_migration_tool-*/
./install all

Now open the Zimbra admin page (https://temporary_ip:7071) and start exporting the domains and user you want to keep. Through ZeXtras -> ZxMig -> Start Migration


 Change the folder to the newly created /opt/zimbra/backup/exports

Select the domains you want to move

Under ZxNotifications check for any error during the export

When this finishes you can start importing on the new Zimbra. First install the Zextra suite (this is free for 30 days and we will remove it after we finish to get rid of warnings afterwards)

cd /tmp && wget http://download.zextras.com/zextras_suite-latest.tgz 
tar xvzf zextras_suite-*.tgz 
cd zextras_suite-*/ 
./install all

Open the Zimbra admin page (https://new_ip:7071) and open the ZeXtas -> ZxBackup -> select Import Backup

 

Change the path to /opt/zimbra/backup/exports

Select the domains you want to import


Select the accounts you want to import

And check if the restore started without warnings

After this finished you can clean up and give your new Zimbra the IP of the old one to start sending and receiving mails again.

If you had an SSL certificate installed now is the time to move that as well. Do this as user zimbra!

On the old zimbra

rsync -au /opt/zimbra/ssl/ zimbra@new_ip:/tmp/ssl/

On the new Zimbra

cp /tmp/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial.key /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial/ 
./zmcertmgr deploycrt comm /tmp/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial.crt /tmp/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial_ca.crt

In any case I would also enable HTTP -> HTTPS redirection

zmprov ms "FQDN" zimbraReverseProxyMailMode redirect

Let's finish:

FIRST: shutdown the old Zimbra machine and make sure it won't boot by itself. Don't forget to copy any backup settings, fetchmail config, cron jobs, ...

On the new Zimbra

cd /tmp/zextras_suite-*/ 
./install -u all
sed -i "s/new_ip/old_ip/g" /etc/hosts /etc/network/interfaces 
reboot

Now your new Zimbra should be available with all the settings, accounts and mails just like it was when you stopped your old Zimbra.