RHEL OS Upgrade

[jamyca17]

We have a Zabbix 3.2 running on RHEL 7.0 with 2 Zabbix proxies. We want to upgrade RHEL version to 8.4. Is there a procedure for upgrade? What will be the considerations and is the version supported? I can't seem to find any of these things in the Zabbix 3.2 manual. Thank you in advance.

[gofree]

you're upgrading supported OS but have unsupported Zabbix proxies - it might work in general for Zabbix proxies but you're on your own and you might see dragons

there are no packages for 3.2 for rhel8 - so the best you can do is upgrade Zabbix with your OS to supported version

https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/3.2/rhel/

https://www.zabbix.com/life_cycle_and_release_policy

[tim.mooney]

Hi jamyca17-

Like gofree said, the version of Zabbix you're on isn't receiving updates any more, so there are no vendor-supplied packages for RHEL 8. If you're capable of packaging it yourself, 3.2 will probably rebuild on RHEL 8 just fine, so there's a good chance the proxies, server, and agent could be made to work on RHEL 8.

The oldest version of PHP on RHEL 8 is 7.2, though, and the Zabbix frontend from 3.2 was designed for an older PHP (in the 5.x series). Most stuff is fine when upgrading from PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2, but there are definitely some functions and changes that are not compatible. My guess is there's a higher chance of running into something that won't work for the 3.2 frontend than with the zabbix_server or proxy compiled binaries.

There's also the issue of the database. You don't say which database engine you're using, but you'll probably be forced to use a newer version on RHEL8 than you were on RHEL 7. That may cause you some issues. For example, with MariaDB, certain things related to max row length became more strict at MariaDB 10.2, which could potentially cause you problems.

Ultimately, my recommendation would be to *first* upgrade the version of Zabbix you're using to something newer, that's supported on both RHEL 7 and RHEL 8. The 5.0 LTS release might be a good fit for that. Then, moving from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 should be pretty easy.

BTW, I'm preparing to upgrade (reinstall the server OS, reload the database from backup) my Zabbix environment too, and will also be moving the server from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8. I've already done a lot of investigation and spent a bunch of time fixing up my database schema. It had been upgraded many times over the years (we started with Zabbix 2.0.2 and have upgraded through many different versions) and the database upgrade procedures sometimes left some things behind that could eventually cause problems for a later upgrade.