Hello Zimbra Partners, Customers, & Friends,
In summary, we will be providing an extended support period for Zimbra 9 (through the end of 2024) in order to provide everyone with additional time to upgrade to Zimbra Daffodil. Issues encountered with the move to Zimbra Daffodil are expected to be resolved in the next Zimbra patch. Keep reading for more detailed information on these updates.
Many of you have contacted us regarding the end-of-support date for Zimbra 9. Thank you to everyone who reached out to us with their concerns. Your feedback is very valuable to us, and we appreciate the concerns which have been raised. We understand that the recent challenges with upgrades and migrations have caused frustration and concern for some of you. We want to assure you that we are actively working to address these issues and improve the documentation and process of upgrading to Zimbra Daffodil. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we strive to provide the best possible experience for everyone.
There have been some challenges with upgrades to Zimbra Daffodil, specifically due to the use of NG components and HSM storage. These challenges have made the upgrade path unclear for many deployments and have been stressful for everyone given the fast-approaching end-of-support deadline. Despite our best efforts to provide data migration from these components to Zimbra Daffodil, issues have prevented some users from being able to accomplish this in certain scenarios. We believe the next patch release will address these issues with fixes and additional migration capabilities and are confident that everyone will be able to upgrade their environments. We still lack a solution for users to replace on-premises deployments of Zimbra Connect but expect to have that resolved before the end of this year.
We have discussed this situation internally and have decided that the best course of action would be for us to provide an extended support period for Zimbra 9 to allow everyone to have the time they need to successfully upgrade. We are committed to providing at least one year between the release of any new product version and the end of support of the prior version. With that in mind, we are providing an extended support period for Zimbra 9 through the end of 2024. We believe this extended support period should provide everyone with enough time to schedule and manage upgrades to Zimbra Daffodil without having to fear being on an unsupported product. Critical bug fixes and security fixes will be included as part of this extended support period.
Thank you again for sharing your concerns with us. We value your feedback and take it seriously.
Not a word about Zimbra 8?! :/
Zimbra 8 support will not be extended.
Pls extend support also for ZImbra Open Source 8.8.15
Zimbra 8 support will not be extended.
Extending support for 9 while not extending support for 8 isn’t very helpful.
Zimbra 8 support has been extended earlier.
Any documentation for on-premise upgrading from 8 to 10!!!
Please create a support call at Zimbra support and they will guide you through the upgrade process.
As an 8.8.15 user, I see no benefit to upgrade to 9, just to upgrade to 10 in less then a year?
I don’t think it’s appropriate to leave 8 users high and dry, despite this I will NOT be upgrading to 9.
And to be blunt, this is encouraging me to take a harder look at Carbonio.
Can’t say I’m surprised. Interesting that Zimbra hasn’t put a pin in the “This is going to be the next LTS” ground given they’re dropping support for the only identified LTS version in less than 4 months and there’s no current upgrade path for “some” users to anything resembling current.
That makes it a hard sell for departments. “Hey the supported upgrade path to X is still broken, but we can upgrade to X-1 to get an extra year of support while they figure it out”. Major upgrades are called “major” for a reason.
Hello Brad,
Yes the upgrade path this time is not as good as it should have been, sorry about that!
The https://www.zimbra.com/product/product-lifecycle/ has been updated with the following:
Beginning with the release of Zimbra Daffodil (Ver.10), Zimbra has formalized a three-year general support period for major releases.
The three-year cycle has been implemented to ensure optimally secured and up-to-date third-party components in Zimbra continue to work as intended. We feel this is critical to maintaining the security of the Zimbra software.
Starting in 2024, two paths are available to customers catering to their tolerance for changes.
– Stable Path (low impact) – contains only necessary changes, including security and critical bug fixes.
– Feature Path (medium impact) – contains some changes which may cause different behavior, including new features.
Regular patch updates are released every other month (bi-monthly). Security patches will be made available when needed outside the regular bi-monthly releases.
Thanks Barry, that’s a good evolution.
I assume Zimbra 9 will be on the Stable path in 2024 ?
From https://www.zimbra.com/product/product-lifecycle/ Zimbra 9 will go out of general support on 03/31/2024.
Existing Zimbra 9 customers have until the end of 2024 to upgrade to the new version (Daffodil v10). During this time, critical bug fixes and security fixes is included as part of this extended support.
Beginning with the release of Zimbra Daffodil (Ver.10), Zimbra has formalized a three-year general support period for major releases.
The three-year cycle has been implemented to ensure optimally secured and up-to-date third-party components in Zimbra continue to work as intended. We feel this is critical to maintaining the security of the Zimbra software. Starting in 2024, two paths are available to customers catering to their tolerance for changes.
– Stable Path (low impact) – contains only necessary changes, including security and critical bug fixes.
– Feature Path (medium impact) – contains some changes which may cause different behavior, including new features.
Stable/feature path will be on Zimbra 10.
Question: will Zimbra continue to deliver Zimbra 9 packages *for RHEL 7* until the end of 2024 ? (with RHEL 7 itself going EOL in June 2024)
Rationale: we were originally planning to migrate horizontally from Zimbra 8.8.15 on CentOS 7 to Zimbra 10 on Rocky 9 in one go, but as Rocky 9 support has been delayed (again), and with this news, we are now instead considering to do an in-place upgrade to Zimbra 9 first (on CentOS 7), and then lift-n-shift to Zimbra 10(.x) on Rocky 9 later on in 2024.
The extended support period for Zimbra 9 is meant for migrating to Zimbra 10. Hopefully you will be well underway with the migration once CentOS 7 goes EOL.
That said we will provide Zimbra 9 updates beyond the CentOS7 EOL, please do make sure to mirror CentOS 7 repos if you intend to use CentOS 7 after EOL, as the public repos of CentOS will probably go away the day after June 30, 2024.
Thanks for the confirmation Barry.
Yes, we mirror all package repositories internally (both CentOS/Rocky and Zimbra repo’s).
And we do intend to move off CentOS 7 in time, we just wanted to move straight to Rocky 9 rather than 8, and that window (from Zimbra support for RHEL 9 to EOL CentOS 7) is still relatively short, hence the question.
Thanks!
So, there will be a migration path to Zimbra 10 for users who use HSM and NG-Backup to (local) S3? by the end of the year?
I really don’t want to migrate to 9 and then to 10, unless I absolutely have to.
Please create a support call at Zimbra support and they will guide you through the upgrade process.
We tested upgrade from 8.8.15 to Daffodil with Support Engineers help.
Somehow it worked with some tweaks.
Support really helped.
Still, we’re going 365. We’re too small I guess, to go thru all the hassle of 8 to 9 to 10.
Honestly, if 8 to 10 were an upgrade compatible with Zextras NG, we may have taken a different path.
Greetings. And what happens who uses the open source version on premmise? Will still have a free version or all users must paid for continuing using the new version?
A new free version will be announced later, meanwhile Zimbra is still open source and you can build Zimbra 10 and use it. https://github.com/zimbra/zm-build#building