we implimented zimbra about the same time as we did esx. in retrospect that was a bad idea because we didn't know much about either. we got a multiserver setup going with one mta, one ldap and 2 mailbox servers. things were going pretty well but once we started putting users on it we started having problems with java pegging the processor at 100% and slowing it to a crawl. eventually i traced this down to a problem with our iscsi san. at this point though I was still learning a lot about vmware so i decided to go virtual to physical with my zimbra servers just so we could get zimbra going worry free as it was a bigger priority.
now that i feel a lot more proficient with both, i've virtualized my ldap and mta servers. they run great. i now want to virtualize my mailbox servers as well. i'm still wary about IO performance. We have an iscsi san and if you search the forums theres many reports of people having problems running zimbra on vmware with iscsi. I've done a lot of tweaking and hoping that this isn't an issue for us. You being FC you may never have this issue.
another thing i need to consider is wether i want to mess with vsmp or not, that is assigning multiple processors to the virtual machine.
As far as database is concerned it's hard to tell. i was importing users wtih 40k messages in their pst files and then some with only a few dozen.
if you go ahead with this please post your experiences.  |