Zimbra 6 Enterprise with multiple locations/servers

[johnblade]

Hi all,

I'm looking at switching an organisation over from a Postfix/Cyrus solution to a Zimbra one. I have one sang however.

Currently the client has one mail server with about 5 different offices accessing the mail remotely. Their e-mails have are quite large (usually shooting 10-20meg PDF files) and some of the sites offices are complaining about speed issues.

They want to 'feel' like it's fast in the offices. This means having e-mail servers at each office.

So, with a postfix/cyrus solution I was thinking about having multiple internal e-mail servers say - joeblow@office1.domainname.com aliasing for joeblow@domainname.com and have something like perdition routing the mail internally.

What consequences would happen with Zimbra if I were to go with a email routing solution? I was thinking some issues might be
* shared calendar's would be limited to offices only
* potential licensing issues? (around 120-150 seats in total split between offices)

Is there a cleaner solution in the Zimbra world? I started investigating HSM but it looks like it's geared for archiving mail to slower drives rather then what I'm looking for.

Ideally it would be great if I could select users Mail Store locations, and have their email clients (Zimbra Desktop/Thunderbird/Outlook) point at their local mail servers.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
JB

[y@w]

I can think of a couple of options right off the top of me head..

There's a page in the Zimbra wiki on setting up a domain that's split across multiple servers that could act like you are talking about. Split Domain - Zimbra :: Wiki


I'm wondering if what you'd really like to do is just use a multi-server install that syncs LDAP across where your users' data is stored on the server at their physical location. There's a quick mention of a similar setup here: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/install...html#post36158

A setup like that would be a single cluster and would solve both the issues you mentioned. I've never done a setup like that (spanning multiple sites with slow links), but I imagine it would be pretty easy. As long as the mail store server at each location has a copy of LDAP you should be cool. Zimbra servers are pretty resilient when others around them fall as long as they aren't dependent upon services from said others.



On a slightly unhelpful side note, you could just give them what they really need: an email server at one location and file servers at each so they can share large files with others, but good luck with changing their habits

[Krishopper]

I would highly recommend the multi-server install as mentioned above; it will do exactly what you want it to do.

You won't have to worry about aliasing sub-domains or anything, and you can provision each user at their respective site and manage things all from one console easily.

As previously mentioned, it will also allow you to have backups of the LDAP data at each site to make that even faster especially if their network link goes down.

I have implemented this before, so if you have any questions don't hesitate to PM me.

[nyomanjs]

Originally Posted by Krishopper

I would highly recommend the multi-server install as mentioned above; it will do exactly what you want it to do.

You won't have to worry about aliasing sub-domains or anything, and you can provision each user at their respective site and manage things all from one console easily.

As previously mentioned, it will also allow you to have backups of the LDAP data at each site to make that even faster especially if their network link goes down.

I have implemented this before, so if you have any questions don't hesitate to PM me.

Hi Krishopper,
Could you share how scenario u have implemented?
Cause i have same issue.
I have used zimbra about 6month for Opensource edition. for remote site, i still use virtual alias like : abc@branch.domain.com abc@domain.com so that i have to install postfix in each remote.
FYI, for remote connection i used vsat with 32kbps and latency 600-700ms. It this possible for sync master ldap and secondary ldap if i want to migrate scenario to multiple server?

Please your suggestion

Rgds