Upgrading High Availability Zabbix

Zabbix Server: This is the core component that polls and traps data from your hosts, generates alerts, and communicates with the front end.
MariaDB Database: Zabbix data (items, triggers, configurations, historical data, etc.) is stored here.
Web Front End (Apache/NGINX + PHP): Web Server that hosts the Zabbix UI.

Backups

I started off by making backups of my VM’s on Proxmox. That way I can easily roll back if something doesn’t end up working.

I selected the VM.

Then went to Backup ➥ Backup now.

Then clicked Backup. I did this for all 3 virtual machines.

I first logged into my first HA server and switched to root.

sudo -s

I then stopped the Zabbix server service.

systemctl stop zabbix-server

Then made a directory to store my backups.

mkdir /opt/zabbix-backup/

Then copied the zabbix_server.conf file into the backup directory.

cp /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf /opt/zabbix-backup/

I also backed up the following directory.

cp -R /usr/share/zabbix/ /opt/zabbix-backup/

I SSH’d into my database server and switched to root.

sudo -s

Then made a directory for my backups.

mkdir /zabbix-db-backups/

I then made a backup of my Zabbix database.

mysqldump -u root -p zabbix > /zabbix-db-backups/zabbix_backup_$(date +%F).sql

Command Explanation

mysqldump – This is the utility provided by MySQL for creating a database backup. It generates a file with SQL statements that can be used to recreate the database structure and data.
-u root – Specifies the username with which to connect to the MySQL server, in this case, ‘root’. This user must have sufficient privileges to access the entire database.
-p – Signals that mysqldump should prompt for the password of the MySQL user account. For security reasons, it’s a good practice not to directly include the password in the command line.
zabbix – This is the name of the database to be dumped. Here, it refers to the Zabbix database, which typically contains configuration and operational data for the Zabbix monitoring system.
> – This character is used to redirect the output from the command on the left (output of mysqldump) to the file specified on the right.
zabbix_back_$(date +%F).sql – Defines the filename of the backup file. It uses shell command substitution $(date +%F) to insert the current date (formatted as YYYY-MM-DD) into the filename. This helps in organizing backups by date, making it easier to locate and manage them over time.

Next, I logged into my MySql as root.

mysql -root

I then set the following variable to allow any users to create and/or modify functions.

SET GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators = 1;

The upgrade process on HA1 is a bit different than HA2.

I first needed to edit the zabbix_server.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

I then scrolled to the very bottom and commented the HANodeName line.

# HANodeName=Node1

Then I uninstalled my current Zabbix repository package.

rm -Rf /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zabbix.list

I then downloaded the latest package.

wget https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/7.2/release/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_latest_7.2+ubuntu22.04_all.deb

I then installed the package.

dpkg -i zabbix-release_latest_7.2+ubuntu22.04_all.deb

I then updated the repository.

apt update

Next, I only upgraded the zabbix-server-mysql first.

apt install --only-upgrade zabbix-server-mysql

After it was done, I edited the zabbix_server.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

Then uncommented HANodeName.

HANodeName=Node1

Then restarted the server.

shutdown -r now

After the reboot I upgraded the frontend, and Nginx conf file.

sudo apt install zabbix-frontend-php zabbix-nginx-conf

Note

If you don’t upgrade the nginx-conf file you’ll just get the Nginx default page when accessing the domain/ip address.

I now have to edit the nginx.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/zabbix/nginx.conf

Then added port 80, and my shared IP address and domain name.

# listen 8080;
# server_name example.com;

listen 80;
server_name 10.33.0.105 domain.com;

Then finally restarted Nginx keepalived.

sudo systemctl restart nginx keepalived

Repeat the same steps, except commenting out HANodeName is not necessary.

Back on the database server, I have to revert the earlier change to mariadb.

I logged in as root.

mysql -root

Then changed it from 1 to 0.

SET GLOBAL log_bin_trust_function_creators = 0;

Now when I logged in it shows my server and frontend versions are up to date.