Is Zimbra always this fragile?

[sagelike]

I can't send email sometimes and now the service crashed, or something but then it came back up though I'm not sure if it's because I hit start on the service since it doesn't tell if it's running or stopped. There was pages of error logs.

The admin panel often generates errors when I attempt to make a change and then it's OK five minutes Later. It takes 10 minutes to boot up with dual 3.4 Ghz hyperthreaded Xeons (800fsb) and still maxes out all four logical CPU's sometimes.

I only have 12 accounts on the system, Centos 5.4 on top of ESXi. What'll happen when there's a couple hundred.

Zimbra offers a lot and I like what it can offer but I'm not sure if it's worth investing in. Is it possible to make Zimbra stable, reliable and configure it to use a reasonable amount of resources?

Any insight or advice from some Zimbra veterans would be greatly appreciated.

thx
Glenn

[uxbod]

It would help us if you were to update your profile with the following output so we can see which ZCS version you are running

su - zimbra
zmcontrol -v

Zimbra is rock solid and even on a low powered Atom based system I have experienced no issues at all. How many CPUs and memory are allocated to the ESXi guest ? What is the underlying storage system ? Is memory allowed to balloon ? How many others guests reside on the host ?

[sagelike]

Hi uxbod

thanks for the reply.

I'm using the Network Edition 6.0.4 with multi-domains on the system and only 12 user accounts thus far.

I've done what I think is a fairly standard installation using defaults and I've also had a problem for a few days which I've outlined in this post:

Zimbra not sending Some messages

I haven't been able to get any help with this problem and zimbra does seem to consume a lot of resources.

I'm running ESXi on top of dual 604 Xeon 3.4 Ghz (HyperT, 800 FSB) on a RAID 5 SATA II on a Adaptec SAS 4800 RAID Card.

- Centos 5.4
- 3 GB Ram (4GB total)
- 6GB /swap
- 100 GB /var
- 4 logical CPUs available to zimbra

There's one other Windows2K guest running but it really doesn't use much resources and even if I turn it off, it doesn't make much difference to Zimbra.

I really want to make this work but need help. Any would be appreciated.

thx
Glenn

[uxbod]

Would you post some O/S stats from within the guest please.

[goran]

I am by all means no Zimbra expert so don't take this for granted, but there is something smelly with Zimbra and ESX. I had similar issue with ESX 3.5. Basically 8 core 25GHz Dell 2950 with nothing on it couldn't make Zimbra virtual machine run fast. When using webmail it was so dreadfully slow that we laughed ... we couldn't believe and almost gave up all hopes.

Then I installed it on "Pentium D CPU 2.80GHz" low-end 1U Supermicro server with 2x10,000rpm ultra320 RAID1 which we almost tossed into garbage and whoohooooo things totally changed!!!

In general I found Zimbra with 80 users being high on cpu and memory compared to Exchange for similar user count but it works nice. Cpu is almost always at 30% and memory at 2.5GB used ... but I am using open source edition which comes with $0 price tag attached so I can't complain. If I paid for it I wouldn't be that happy tough.

I would like to hear other opinions on Zimbra/ESX.

[uxbod]

Were the CPUs pinned to the VM or allowed to float ? Was memory allowed to balloon ? Did you tune back swappiness at all ?

[Mike From Markham]

Hi uxbod

thanks for the reply.

I'm using the Network Edition 6.0.4 with multi-domains on the system and only 12 user accounts thus far.

I've done what I think is a fairly standard installation using defaults and I've also had a problem for a few days which I've outlined in this post:

Zimbra not sending Some messages

I haven't been able to get any help with this problem and zimbra does seem to consume a lot of resources.

I'm running ESXi on top of dual 604 Xeon 3.4 Ghz (HyperT, 800 FSB) on a RAID 5 SATA II on a Adaptec SAS 4800 RAID Card.

- Centos 5.4
- 3 GB Ram (4GB total)
- 6GB /swap
- 100 GB /var
- 4 logical CPUs available to zimbra

There's one other Windows2K guest running but it really doesn't use much resources and even if I turn it off, it doesn't make much difference to Zimbra.

I really want to make this work but need help. Any would be appreciated.

thx
Glenn

This may sound odd but less is more.

Lower the Vcpu to just 1 and test with that. How many VCPU do the other guests have assigned to them?
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf pg3

Do you get the same results when the vmdk is on local stoarge vs shared or the other way around?

Is the cpu doing alot? Vmware tools installed? Lower memory on vm to 2GB and start testing with that

Check resorces....

Vi Client-->Performance-->advanced
Look at Memory,Cpu,Disk IO
focas on past day or week and Avg, Max

Hope this helps....

Mike

[Klug]

I see more an ESX issue than ZCS issue here.

You can also check if hyperthreading is enable (or not).
Are the VMware tools installed in the VM?

What is the use ot 100 GB /var ?

[sylvester_0]

Wow, sounds bad. I know that RAID 5 isn't generally recommended for Zimbra, but I can't see it being a problem for this low number of users. You should run `top` on the VM during a slow period and see if you're waiting on IO.

I'm currently running a KVM machine and have no speed issues. Are you locked to VMWare? I tried using ESX 4i once but got turned off from the proprietary-ness of it. It almost teases you by being a stripped down Linux distro that doesn't have any tools that a standard install would have.

[sagelike]

Sorry for the slow reply. I've been working into the wee hours trying to get Zimbra up and running smoothly over the past two weeks and needed to take a break from it.



The server seems to have been running smoothly the last few days though I noticed the CPU's still max out for short periods and then settle back down.

The CPU's are assigned and memory is set at 3GB. Memory usage seems fairly steady at 1.5 GB give or take.

I'm going to try playing with the settings as per suggestions from Mike from Markham.

I am still having problems with the desktop notifier issue from Zimbra Desktop and I'm not sure if that a ZD problem or Zimbra issue.