Large Zimbra deployments on VM

[Tim Ross <tross@calpoly.edu>]

We are currently running ZCS 5.0.19 NE on Red Hat 5 on hardware.  Our current servers are coming up on the end of their service contracts later in the year and our Central Server group is encouraging us to consider going to a VM setup instead.  We are currently on the path to upgrade to 6.0.5 by summer, so that is where we would be when we would switch to VM if we decide to go that way.  I have read several forum posts about VM setups working pretty well with ZCS, but I haven't seen anyone with more than around 1000 users talk about using VM.  We have VMWare here on campus, so that would be our VM environment.  We have around 30,000 accounts (around 22,000 student accounts, many of which are lightly or not used). 

Are any of you running a large Production system in a VM environment?  Any suggestions on questions to ask our Central Server guys about our current VM environment to determine if it can support our ZCS setup?

Thanks,

Tim Ross
Application Administrator
Collaboration Support Group