Re: Let's get the ball rolling: Hardware requirements for Zimbra

[Tom Golson <tgolson@neo.tamu.edu>]

Hi Jeff,
     Well ... that's kind of one of those things.  Right now, we're living and dying on the fact that we're running "highly available" disk.  The mailstore vendor we were going to did very little database magic, and simple file system backups once a week were "ok".
     Zimbra, though, does a lot more database stuff, and simple, filesystem backups aren't enough.  The Zimbra backup engine though, is _great_.  Right now we're keeping it on the same array, but we're looking at putting a separate controller out there, with big, slow disk that we can park those backups on and get a little more availability.  Then, these backups we can spool off to tape periodically.
     Generally speaking, though, our backup "goal" for mail is disaster recovery.  Mailbox-level restore is something we've only been able to recently consider, thanks to the Zimbra backup engine.

--Tom

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Wasilko" <Jeff.Wasilko@tufts.edu>
To: "Steve Hillman" <hillman@sfu.ca>, tgolson@neo.tamu.edu
Cc: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, March 5, 2008 11:32:14 AM GMT -08:00 Tijuana / Baja California
Subject: Re: Let's get the ball rolling: Hardware requirements for Zimbra

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 11:25:29AM -0800, Steve Hillman wrote:
> 
> Zimbra doesn't seem to be computationally intensive (8 cores is kind of overkill), but it loves memory.  Even with more, smaller servers, I'm not sure how small the connecting population would have to be, per server, to get away with less than 8 GB of RAM on a mailstore.  We'll probably be adding two more LS41's to the mix, in order to give folks a warmer fuzzy about capacity, but we're really not doing too badly, right now.  We just don't have a lot of extra capacity for unexpected demand peaks.  But, we are delivering around 300,000 messages a day to the complex, and supporting peak usage accross the complex of about 6,000 concurrent connections.

How are backups going for you?