Zimbra servers on VMware

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

Hi folks,
  It's been awhile since we've visited server hardware discussions on this list, and in that time I think that virtualization has advanced to the point where it could be practical to run Zimbra in a VM, if only to gain benefits like fast recovery time and vMotion operations for physical hardware maintenance. We're weighing that decision now for our site. We just upgraded to new hardware with 12 cores and 192gb ram for each server, with 4 mailbox servers in total (for about 60,000 accounts), but we're thinking that might be more than we need and we'd have enough headroom to insert VMware between the hardware and OS

I'm curious whether any larger sites have taken the plunge yet. If so, did you stick with similarly sized mailbox servers or did you opt for more servers with fewer users on each? And what did you do with your storage - did you convert to vmdk's and let VMware manage the back-end storage or did you import the LUNs directly into the guest OS (as fibre channel or iSCSI LUNs)?

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Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University