Best strategy to upgrade Zabbix 4.2 to 6

[feliperamos000]

Hi everyone!

I'm new here in the forum so, sorry in advance if I posted this question in the wrong discussion.

We have a zabbix server and a bunch of proxies running on version 4.2, the os is RHEL 7 on all of them. The db is a Postgresql 9.6, that we plan to upgrade it too.

As the 6.0 LTS zabbix version is out we wish to implement it, but honestly I have no idea what is the best strategy to do it because, if I do not unterstand it wrong, the 6.0 version only works on RHEL/CentOS 8+.

Is it possible to install the new server and proxies on a Rhel/Centos 8 version and point-it to the old database? If it is possible, is there any db script to apply as the 5.X versions?

Thanks in advance!

[Markku]

I'm not a RHEL/CentOS kind of guy, but in general I would do that kind of major upgrade like this:

1. Install new Zabbix server, new proxies and new database server (both with current OS and application levels, fulfilling the Zabbix requirements as well as your own operational requirements), most probably with temporary IP addresses
2. Export the old database and import it to the new server
3. Configure new Zabbix server to use the new database
4. Starting the new Zabbix server will automatically do the Zabbix database upgrade
5. Make any necessary IP address changes on the servers so that everything works correctly, shut down the old Zabbix components.

Before doing that, read and understand all the upgrade notes between 4.2 and 6.0. You will find all the required database versions and so on. You can still upgrade directly from 4.2 to 6.0 but you need to understand all the relevant changes in the whole system.

You can do the steps 1-4 also in an isolated environment just to see how the upgrade process goes, if that suits your needs.

In case of major problems you can go back to your old Zabbix environment by changing the IP addresses again appropriately, shutting down and starting up the components, and continue investigation.

Markku

[Markku]

Also note that there are good instructional videos about the upgrades in Youtube channels of Zabbix and Dmitry Lambert.

Markku

[feliperamos000]

Thanks for the reply!

We will try the upgrade following the steps 1-4 and do some tests, our database is over 1.6Tb now so it's gonna take some time...

About the Dmitry Lambert youtube reference, since we got too busy with another jobs here i've forgotten that this exist, so i'll watch the videos once I have time.

If we got any problem and can't solve it after some debugs, we'll contact this forum!

Thanks again for answering our question!