Re: Large Zimbra deployments on VM

[Doug Curtis <doug.curtis@oit.gatech.edu>]

What are the numbers of the different clients being used?  I'm interested in how many imap/pop/webclient/ZCO users there are.

Thanks,

Doug

----- "Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@drake.edu> wrote:

> From: "Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@drake.edu>
> To: zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca
> Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 9:19:19 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: Large Zimbra deployments on VM
>
> We have about 12,000 accounts running on a mixed virtual/physical 
> environment. Our 2 LDAP servers run on XenServer VMs. The 2 MTAs are
> on 
> physical boxes now, but will be migrated soon (waiting for a RAM
> upgrade 
> to the Xen cluster). Our 2 mailbox servers are a different story. We'd
> 
> like to virtualize those, but will probably leave them as physical
> boxes 
> for awhile simply because they require a lot more CPU & RAM than the 
> LDAPs or MTAs.
> 
> The hardware we were previously using for the LDAPs was higher
> capacity 
> than what they really needed (8 CPU cores, 8 GB RAM). In the virtual 
> environment we provisioned considerably less (2 CPUs, 2 GB RAM) and
> they 
> are doing just fine. I'll be able to recover some resources when 
> migrating the MTAs as well.
> 
> We managed to do the switch to virtual LDAPs with little downtime
> simply 
> by provisioning 2 new VMs, adding them to the Zimbra cluster as LDAP 
> replicas, promoting one of the new replicas to master, and shutting
> down 
> the old hardware. We expect minimal downtime when virtualizing the
> MTAs. 
> If we decide to virtualize the mailboxes, we'll again have minimal 
> downtime by provisioning new VMs and then migrating accounts to them.
> 
> In short, make sure your virtual environment has the capacity, and 
> ideally is using a high-speed SAN for storage, and you should be
> good.
> 
> On 2010-02-17 at 18:35:42, you wrote:
> >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
> >
> 
> -- 
> Daniel A. Ramaley
> Network Engineer 2
> 
> Dial Center 118, Drake University
> 2407 Carpenter Ave / Des Moines IA 50311 USA
> Tel: +1 515 271-4540
> Fax: +1 515 271-1938
> E-mail: daniel.ramaley@drake.edu

-- 
Doug Curtis
doug.curtis@oit.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech OIT/A&I
404.385.0390