Zimbra Migration Postmortem
I posted a short while back about excitement surrounding a migration from Exchange 2003 to Zimbra for our company. The migration has had its ups and downs and now that it has happened and I have had a couple weeks to dig in as both a user and administrator I would like to share our experience.
The general takeaways are that Zimbra isn’t perfect. It does some things worse than Exchange and some things better but the balance, in my opinion, slants heavily in Zimbra’s favor. I’ll break it up into migration and then administration/usage.
The Migration
The migration was a bruiser. It involved a couple nights of failed attempts and then a brutal 6pm – 4am effort to get everything finished well enough to go to sleep. I had a sysadmin helping me that knew his stuff so the details of how to complete it aren’t here (he handled most of the work), just the headaches I saw. The issues included:
- The bulk migration tool was not able to migrate calendars.
- The individual .pst importing tool also was not able to migrate the calendars. It would just fail like crazy and then give up because the error count was too high. For users with 2k+ appointments the migration would fail after only a few dozen events. I eventually got these calendars over by doing .pst exports/imports with Outlook itself rather than trying to use server-side migration tools.
- We had to run the bulk migration over 2 nights because it took a long time. This isn’t a huge surprise because we had 100’s of 1000’s of emails, events, and contacts to migrate but the issue is that the second run re-imported everything imported in the first batch despite settings to the contrary. This essentially created duplicates of all emails and contacts.
To remove the duplicates of emails I used a perl script found at this page (this script actually worked fantastic). For contacts I used the Zimbra CLI to bulk clear the applicable address books and used client apps to re-import cleanly.
Administration/Usage
Zimbra started to shine after the migration ordeal. We immediately had all of our OSX users sync’ing their iCal, Apple Mail, and Address Book apps with the server, I had most of the Outlook users on the Zimbra Outlook connector without much effort, and most things worked well. There were a few issues I encountered.
- The Outlook connector worked flawlessly in XP Pro but was very difficult to install in Vista. You need to follow the tip here and then just keep trying until it works. If it doesn’t work remove the program and try again. I really hate Vista and the fact that it makes things so hard.
- The activesync with Windows Mobile is pretty flaky. It fails often for no apparent reason. I settled on using IMAP for email and just sync’ing my contacts and calendar and this seems to work consistently. It was as if it was stumbling over the greater volume of items to sync when the email was part of it.
- I’m not real happy with the calendar sharing. Without admin intervention a user must share their calendar with each individual user and each of those individuals must login to the web interface to accept the share and see it. These notifications cannot be accepted in Mail/Outlook/Entourage or whatever else. Once these calendars are accepted though you can use almost any app you want as your calendar and that is nice.
- There are connector apps for almost everything, but many of them are not updated to the latest versions of their target apps and none of them are completely polished and perfect. The Outlook and OSX ones seem to be the best but those also are not without issues.
In general though Zimbra works pretty well. I have calendar and contacts sync’d with my laptop using the OSX sync services and also sync’d to my Windows Mobile phone using activesync – a setup that never would have been possible with Exchange (without Entourage, but Entourage sucks in my opinion).
There are shortcomings but as I have worked through various user issues I have discovered what I believe is Zimbra’s biggest strength – its openness and open source underpinnings. It is a huge, powerful piece of code and between the CLI and the REST API you can do almost anything as an admin. Now that I am getting the hang of it I have created a set of quick scripts to interact with the CLI for doing things like auto-mounting calendars shared with distribution groups (getting around the email acceptance bummer mentioned above). The REST API is great and documented a bit here. It is completely trivial to export people’s contacts or calendars and to constrain what is exported using different parameters using the REST API.
Another big advantage in Zimbra’s favor is the community is quite strong and helpful. They have a wiki, forums, and bugzilla all very active and open.
So this is a bit of a ramble, but overall I am exceptionally happy that we made this switch. Zimbra is not perfect but it is powerful and utterly open making it possible to find workarounds for almost anything and it helps that it runs on Linux as well.
It’s been over six months since your migration to Zimbra. How’s it going?
Hey David,
It is going pretty well – glad we made the switch overall. Though, our environment is probably not typical, only 12 people and mostly all use macbooks and iphones. Sync with those works great and the caldav support through iCal against Zimbra is very good. Have 2 users on Outlook and that seems to work very well too.
We have 2 users on blackberries and they have more issues than everyone else combined. You still need the blackberry server and make it talk to Zimbra with a couple cludges and their calendars just don’t seem to stay in sync. I suspect it is something Zimbra support can resolve (there are deployments with lots of BB users supposedly) but simply haven’t had time to gather the relevant logs and file a proper ticket.
Upgrades are smooth, have received reasonable assistance when have filed support tickets (had an issue with fs.file-max setting in my OS not sticking so Zimbra would run out of file handles and stop delivering messages), and overall I just really like being able to admin a linux box running components that I understand (postfix, mysql, etc).
If you are a command line person the command line tools that come with Zimbra are pretty excellent, allows automation of just about anything.
In any case, generally a very positive experience but we do have a relatively small deployment here. Hope that helps.
Joe
Well, we just migrated to Zimbra and its been hell on earth. It has taken over a month now and we still are not fully migrated.
This is on the hosted site….
The issues at hand seem to be all related to the horrific migration tool. You would conclude that they never have done an exchange migrations before. I had to recommend Exmerge to them!!!!
We also keep finding bad things with the hosted environment. For instance, macs do not have access to the GAL. There also is no access to LDAP from the internet.
All in all this has been the worse migration I have been involved with and I have performed over 30 exchange migrations.
I would not have agreed to this as a solution, it was approved by upper management before I was hired.
I give Zimbra a large F!!!!
Mad Network Administrator.
I won’t disagree on the migration tools side, they are/were really bad. The only reason it was bearable here is we have a very small user base (only ~12 accounts to migrate). It was still a bruiser even with that small user count so I imagine doing a larger migration would be a pretty massive headache.
Hopefully you guys are able to sort out the remaining issues, bummer on the bad experience thus far.
To “JUst migrated,” which hosting company did you use?
To anyone else, we are using an Exchange host today, I would have to assume that a user creating, then importing their own PST into Zimbra desktop would avoid some of the migration issues?
For what it is worth that was the combo that worked best here. User exports PST, installs zimbra connector for outlook, then imports their PST.
We migrated email and contacts with the bulk tool and restored calendars with PST imports in outlook.
Another Atlanta area ZCS convert here.
I recently (10 days ago) migrated a customer’s 50 Exchange 2000 mailboxes from an aging Win 2000 server to ZCS Network Edition. We took a long, hard look at Exchange 2007 but wanted something that would be OS and browser agnostic.
We decided to use the Zimbra Exchange Migration Wizard and migrate only messages going back three months prior to the migration date. Everything else the users had to archive to Outlook PST files. This turned out to be the worst part of the exercise. The migration itself went well and took about 5 hours – drinking coffee at home and watching it happen via a VPN conection.
The more tech savvy users are delighted and happily synching up their iPhones, Macs, Linux desktops etc. A few, for whom email and Outlook are synonymous, are having a tougher time. I could not make the Zimbra Connector for BES work; it’s a cludge. So out BB users are hooked in via a simple Internet mail connection.
One user, who has 100% vision loss, is using Thunderbird. Her screen reading software could not cope with the Ajax web pages.
I’m now poking around the admin side of Zimbra and like what I see so far. No more worries like: Information Store bloat, or why third party Exchange backup software craps out or, if I kick a domain controller my email server will have a seizure.
Regards.
Thanks for the info Andrew – always good to hear more experiences. Despite the rough migration I ran into myself I am very happy we made the move. I really appreciate the admin interface and the command line tools are really excellent should anything else need to be done.
We had a bit of the same in terms of the OSX/iPhone/Linux/etc users (including myself) being delighted and the Outlook veterans being less impressed – and the two BB users we have still have issues (iPhone users have none). The BES connection stuff in Zimbra is most definitely a cludge.