Steve Hillman wrote:
But I need to plan for the next step beyond pilot, because our data centre hardware lease comes due this summer. Assuming we go full production with Zimbra, we'll have about 50,000 accounts. I'd like to hear what other sites are running on, especially those of you who have already gone production - were your hardware choices the right ones, or are you having to scale up? Thanks!
We're running on 6 IBM HS21 Dual QuadCore Xeon Blades with 10G of Memory. RHEL4-64 is installed on internal harddrives with the mail stores, backup file and redolog each stored on their own LUNs on the NetApp. 2x LDAP Servers, 2x Mailboxes (with Proxy service) and 2x MTAs (AV/AS handled by IronPort appliances).
We have 6k accounts and the only sizing issue we have run into really is storage related.
During the initial changeover we used imapsync and some custom scripts to pull information from our old system and put it into zimbra. The problem arose where the redolog was tracking all of the migrated mail. So we kinda panicked and gave the redolog it's own LUN as large as the mailstore (600G for each mailbox server). Turns out that that was really only needed for the migration as the redolog only needs about 100M or so (for our volume :) ).
Our other issue is backing up said data. Full zimbra backups for about 3k accounts (with the zip option) takes about 2 days to complete. Without the zip option our NetVault tape system starts to choke on the number of files its processing nightly.
If I could do it all over again, barring any insight zimbra (or anyone else) could give to better size storage, I would make many smaller mailbox servers instead of a few big ones.
Damion -- Damion Alexander Systems Administrator Vassar College 124 Raymond Ave Box 13 - Computer Center 205 Poughkeepsie, NY 12604 (845) 437-7759