Re: Zimbra with Sun Directory, ... Solaris?

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: ab5602@zimbra.wayne.edu
To: hillman@sfu.ca
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 8:27:20 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: [BOUNCE] Re: Zimbra with Sun Directory, ... Solaris?


Hi Gerrit,

Well, regarding specifically the Zimbra upgrade process, you probably have much more experience with this than we do.  I've been maintaining 2 test/dev environments for about 8 months now and we are gearing up for our production deployment w/ 66,000 users in January.  Although, we've had very little problems during upgrades, it certainly isn't a complex environment either. 

Seems with our other IT systems, the more complex they are made, sometimes even for redundancy sake, the more the system is prone to have down-time due to something or other.  With Zimbra, we are having a sister IT organization called Merit (merit.edu) handle our production Zimbra infrastructure, OS, etc., so we can focus on provisioning, LDAP synchronization, COS and other service items.  Merit services other .edus in Michigan and can combine their experiences/lessons learned between their customers.

With respect to systems that we manage in-house, 99% of the time, down-time is due to:

 - "Vendor/Brand Swapping", using a vendor that you like, versus what is suggested or implied by the software designers
 - Customizations to turn-key systems (i.e. LDAP schema combining)
 - Sun clustering
 - IPMP (IP MultiPathing) and other network trickery
 - Clustered/Global file systems (Veritas, etc.)

There is often a certain amount of added complexity that must be implemented for large systems.  Here, being too idealistic, always introduces problems; Like using Sun/Sparc hardware, when the product was designed in a Linux or Windows x86 environment or adding 4 failover/load-balanced NICs to a machine for "redundancy", when you've never seen a single server NIC fail in 15 years and you only push 40mbits of traffic. =)  It also helps to remind my management and systems people here that we are not CNN or Google and still have a rather small customer base, budget and knowledge-set in comparison.

-Rob

--
Rob Thompson, Systems Analyst
Enterprise Applications
Computing & Information Technology
Wayne State University
313-577-5645

Public Key: http://pgp.wayne.edu/rob.key

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerrit Bos" <gbos@uoguelph.ca>
To: "Rob Thompson" <ab5602@wayne.edu>
Cc: zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca, "Bill Moss" <bill.moss@nyu.edu>, amacpher@uoguelph.ca
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 6:02:55 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: Zimbra with Sun Directory, ... Solaris?


Valuable discussion! 

We also decided to keep Zimbra as more or less a turn-key system. We do use the GAL tie-in to our central directory, which is SunOne, and wish it had a few things which would help with the lookup Eg. knowing which Peter Smith is a student activist, and which Peter Smith is a vice-president or what department (ou) someone belongs to is helpful. It's on our list to try to address, either via customization or a ZImlet lookup we've read from some of you. A couple of other priorities are ahead of it right now, but our clients would like this quite a lot. (My example is a bit dramatic, but we do have some noteworthy naming conflicts.) 

PS Robert, we have been a bit gunshy on the upgrades since we had quite a longer than expected outage when we moved from 5.0.4 to 5.0.7 this past summer. Key piece may be that we have a RH cluster. We've been frozen at 5.0.7 now since then, with a plan to upgrade to 5.0.11 this winter break. Do you have any resources which would help us beyond what's publicaly available, which make them stellar at Wayne State? (Said with a bit of professional envy, since for our clients, especially the heavy Calendar users, I'd love to be able to upgrade every time Zimbra encourages us to do so, which is so far every version :-) ) 

Gerrit Bos 
Lead, Communication and Collaboration Cluster, CCS 
Email: gbos@uoguelph.ca 
Ph: (519) 824-4120 Ext. 53489 


----- "Robert M. Thompson" wrote: 
> 
> All, 
> 
> The Solaris/Sun brand is also the mainstay of our IT infrastructure, especially SunOne Directory. I don't think that porting the Zimbra schema to SunOne is impossible, but rather, I'm in complete agreement with Steve in his statement "It's really best to think of Zimbra as a turn-key delivered product.". 
> 
> We evaluated both options (disecting LDAP or leaving it bundled), and have in the past successfully integrated other turnkey product schemas into our SunOne LDAP schema. The major problem always turns out to be upgrades/updates. If you want to maintain the simplicity and the integrity of Zimbra's stellar upgrade process, avoid customized external LDAP schemas like the plague. 
> 
> -Rob 
> 
> -- 
> Rob Thompson, Systems Analyst 
> Enterprise Applications 
> Computing & Information Technology 
> Wayne State University 
> 313-577-5645 
> 
> Public Key: http://pgp.wayne.edu/rob.key 
> 
> 
> ----- "Bill Moss" <bill.moss@nyu.edu> wrote: 
> 
> > Not sure anyone would know but am interested in other .edu's 
> > thoughts: 
> > 
> > Zimbra can authenticate against a Sun Directory, what keeps it from 
> > supporting Sun Directory as its main LDAP store? 
> > Is the structure of Zimbra's schema (or objects) incompatible with Sun 
> > 
> > Directory? If not, what other factors make Sun Directory 
> > unsupportable/ 
> > impossible with Zimbra (is it wanting to have the whole thing OSS, 
> > licensing, ..)? 
> > 
> > What is likelihood for Zimbra to support Solaris? 
> > 
> > I ask because I'm guessing we're not alone in having significant 
> > infrastructure built around Sun Directory and Solaris Sparc. Adopting 
> > 
> > Zimbra (for us) would be a much easier prospect if Sun Directory, 
> > Solaris, or ideally both, were supported. 
> > 
> > Thanks, 
> > 
> > Bill Moss 
> > ITS eServices 
>