Best Way To Have Servers In Different Locations?

[NaughtyusMaximus]

Hi all,
I recently converted my company over to using Zimbra, and so far am very happy with the result. One thing I do need a little help with is getting some redundancy into the system. I have ~30 international users connecting to my server through Indonesia, and ~100 users connecting locally from Vancouver. Since my company is not yet ready to shell out for internet connections with SLAs, I find that at least once a month there are some short system outages.

This wouldn't normally be such a big deal, but since ~30 people are on basically the opposite working schedule as me, it means that any downtime is magnified by the amount of time it takes me to get into the office. What I'd like to do is have the Indonesian users set up their own server (as 'mx2.mycompany.com'), that can act as a secondary access point, and perhaps the primary access point for them (as the 'net connections between Indonesia and North America are generally pretty spotty).

Can someone point me in the right direction for how best to achieve this?

[bdial]

you can have multiple mailbox servers. so you could have a vancouver.domain.com and an indonesia.domain.com server. when you create accounts you specifcy which server you wish the account to be on, and you can move them between servers (although over a slow link with a lot of mail this would be a pain).

[NaughtyusMaximus]

That sounds like probably the best way - but the volume of email transmitted in Vancouver is quite high, I don't suppose there are any ways of implementing this not as a complete mirror of the main system?

[bdial]

this isn't a complete mirror. this is a multi server deployment. so mail comes in to the mta server (which can be on the same server as one of the mailbox servers). if the user it's bound for is on the indonesia server then it delivers the mail to the indonesia server. if the user is in vancouver it delivers the mail to the vancouver server. the mail is not duplicated and a user in vancouver could not log in to the indonesia server and view his mail because his mailbox is not on that server.

you should look at the multisrever install docs

[NaughtyusMaximus]

Ok. That helps me in the situation where service in Vancouver is offline, as Indonesian users are still able to access their mail. Is there a good way of allowing Vancouver users to access the Indonesian server, and/or the Indonesian users to access the Vancouver server when needed?

I've taken a look at the Multi Server docs, but I'm not sure which method is best suited for my situation. They seem like they are more geared toward multiple servers in a single server farm.

[bdial]

not really. multiserver isn't intended for redundancy, it's really intended for load balancing and multi-site installs. you can move a user's mailbox using the admin ui or even command line, so like if you had to take the vancouver server offline for a long itme it might be worth moving all their mailboxes to the indonesia server so that they could still access it. but like i said if you have a lot of users and a lot of mail that could take a while over a slow internet link.

[y@w]

Are you still wanting mail to be delivered to this second sever while the connection is down? If not, I'd just have them use Zimbra Desktop so they have a local copy of their mail.

That would be a great free alternative if that's all you're concerned about.