As announced in Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 and reiterated in the Zimbra Collaboration 8.6 Release Notes, Zimbra is deprecating distribution and support of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11, service pack 3 and later, with Zimbra Collaboration 8.6 being the final supporting version.
Making an end-of-life (EoL) decision is never easy. In this situation, the number of Zimbra Collaboration downloads for RedHat Linux, CentOS Linux and Ubuntu have continued to increase, while downloads of SUSE Linux have decreased significantly.
The Zimbra Collaboration distribution package is currently undergoing major improvements to allow for easier upgrades and patching. Maintaining support for SLES throughout this re-packaging would be difficult. In order to simplify packaging and better support the most prominent Linux operating systems, we are officially announcing the deprecation of SLES for future releases of Zimbra Collaboration.
We apologize to customers on SLES 11 for any inconvenience this may cause; existing SLES packages will remain available for Zimbra Collaboration 8.6.
For customers who wish to move to RedHat Linux, CentOS Linux or Ubuntu, the Rolling Upgrade or rsync methods of migration can be utilized:
- Rolling Upgrades: http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Rolling_Upgrades_for_ZCS
- rsync migration: http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/ZCS_to_ZCS_rsync_Migration
Please let us know if you have any questions.
I hope that Zimbra also takes the effort of supporting Debian which should be relatively easy to add.
Please have a look in the 9 year old feature request 10274 (https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10274).
Hi Alexander, let me see if I can find you anything on Debian.
Thanks again for the Debian question Alexander. Currently, we have no plans to support Debian; however, if we add support for an additional OS, this is a good candidate.
Hopefully, CentOS7 will be supported for a long time.
I think the main advantage of SLES is that you can run it “free” on vSphere.
But apparently, not many do this to run Zimbra (neither do we).
We are planning to support CentOS for the foreseeable future. Thanks for asking.
Hi Rainer_d,
no, the SLES for VMware license deal was discontinued a while ago already. For me this was a reason to migrate my Zimbra box from SLES to Ubuntu.
Andreas
what are the Os that are not supported here?
Hi Kathy, do you need more granularity into which versions of Red Hat Linux, CentOS Linux or Ubuntu?
Personally I think this is a huge mistake, and it only shows how uncomitted Zimbra is on supporting Enterprise operating systems.
SLES is installed on a huge customer base of ours, and today it is the most accessible and reliable enterprise Linux OS out there, being supported by tech giants like SAP, VMware, IBM, and others.
Boo for you guys.
We were SLES Zimbra customers (now VMware/Ubuntu). I think Zimbra should reconsider SLES 12 for future releases. SLES has proved to be a solid enterprise distribution and it now offers unlimited free virtual servers. Lack of deployment environments is another argument in favour of SaaS providers.
PS Needless to say, the same argument goes for openSUSE
Thank you for the feedback Armando. You mentioned moving to Ubuntu, are you liking that over SLES? (i.e. are you considering a move back to a version of SUSE?)
Thanks for your reply, Mattew. I do prefer SLES virtualization over VMware, for the very same reasons I prefer Zimbra over MS Exchange. We do have a diverse IT ecosystem, so it might be the case that we keep SLES/OpenSUSE for some services. I do hope Zimbra will rekindle its collaboration with SUSE, for the good of the commercial OS cause.
Good to know that SLES12 will not bee supported! We have planed to migrate to Zimbra. But now we have to choose an other.