Hyper-v or Vmware

[drdre]

hi all..

Anyone using HyperV or vmware ?

At present my company is looking to go down the road of vitualization... and at present we have a esxi 4x box as a demo...

Just wanted to hear other users input.

[Dirk]

I've ran Zimbra in a VMWare environment before and it worked ok but the host server was performing other duties so I ended up putting Zimbra onto it's own hardware and it seemed to perform better, but the dedicated hardware was newer so it's hard to say.

Performance would have been the only issue, there was no stability issue, and ESXi is a great platform. I'd say go with it. I've not used hyperv simply because microsoft's licensing model for it baffles me.

With the VMWare acquisition of Zimbra, I'd expect any issue you may have with it would be ironed out quickly!

Personal preference on this would be dedicated hardware for a Zimbra server though.

[y@w]

Our production Zimbra environment is in VMware ESX. It works quite well.

While I can't really speak from experience on Hyper-V, I do believe you're limited to 1 vCPU when running Linux guests (and limited to RHEL and SLES). That would be something to consider. I found the chart here: About Virtual Machines and Guest Operating Systems for Hyper-V

[Hivos]

We've been running zimbra on xen for over a year now without any problems. However I'd say vmware might be the "smart" choice now after their acquisition of zimbra. Hyper-V scared me off with the artificial 1 cpu limit and incomprehensible licensing model.

[hfield]

I run Zimbra Community Edition on ESXi 4 (along with 9 more virutalized servers on a single piece of hardware). I have about 150 users. I am running the 32bit version on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Allowed 2.5 GB of ram for the ubuntu server. Runs great

[raj]

we have a large Vmware ESXi farm..with lots and lots of Zimbra VM's.
works like a charm...not to mention ESXi 4 is free along with Zimbra OSS

* Free does not mean in a respect to money..Free as in "freedom".

we do spend lot of money running ESXI and OSS zimbra.

Raj

[imx]

If youre having performance issues with VMware on ESX, you could pass through an iSCSI volume for /opt/zimbra.... if you have a NAS of course Ive tried that and helps no end...

Or of course assign a raw volume to the VM, meaning the disk I/O is only for Zimbra.

[swrightsls]

Originally Posted by imx

If youre having performance issues with VMware on ESX, you could pass through an iSCSI volume for /opt/zimbra.... if you have a NAS of course Ive tried that and helps no end...

Or of course assign a raw volume to the VM, meaning the disk I/O is only for Zimbra.

Are you suggesting that iSCSI volumes will yield better performance for /opt/zimbra than locally SAS drives? We're not running Zimbra in a VM (yet), but have a dedicated dual quad-xeon box with 6x 15k SAS drives at RAID-10. We also have an Equallogic PS5000 with 16x SATA drives, but it's only used for user file storage so far. Due to lack of comfort level with Zimbra so far, I've hesitated to introduce any SAN volumes.

I'm curious if others have experience with similar hardware. I don't think our ZCS server is overworked; most of our performance issues seem to be client related, with poor browser performance/stability. (ie: compare Firefox with Chromium - the difference is staggering - FF3.5/3.6 is a slug...)

[hfield]

I was running Zimbra on ESXi 4 from an iSCSI datastore and continually had problems. Don't know if it was the vmware connecting to the iSCSI or the iSCSI target causing the loss of connection, but I moved Zimbra from iSCSI to a local datastore and have had excellent results since. I was using OpenFiler to serve the iSCSI targets but continually had the issue with loss of connection from vmware. But only for the Ubuntu 8.04 Zimbra OCS 6.02 server. Other connections to iSCSI targets from other VM's seemed to be fine. Anyway, I have been running on a local vmware datastore for about 2 months with absolutely no problems.

[raj]

for all practical purposes a high end(SAS) + RAID 10 local store should work better than iscsi and in less complex to maintain.
good iSCSI (HW bases, not linux VM appliance) is choice of network model more than performence.

Raj