Introducing zimbra in my company

[smg]

Hi

This is my first posting here, as I have no experience with zimbra whatsoever. What I'm looking for, is your opinions on what I'm planning to do, to see if it's possible, feasible and if it makes sense.

Here's what I'm up to:

I would like to introduce the community version of zimbra to my company as an alternative to introducing MS-Exchange.
It is supposed to rid our approx. 40 Outlook clients of their local .pst files as Exchange would do, because we have users with roaming profiles.
I intend to install zimbra on a virtual machine (vSphere 4) running CentOS 5.4 x64.
The catch is, that this vm will not have a public ip address. We are running an dedicated mailserver (qmail on CentOS) that is hosted in an external Datacenter. I can't install zimbra on that one, because I host several other domains on that box as well.

Would it be possible to keep the (local) zimbra user accounts in sync with the (external) qmail user accounts? Due to the limitations given by the private IP, this sync would have to be initiated by zimbra, I guess...

Rgds
SMG

[phoenix]

You can actually point your MX records at your public IP then forward port 25 (and 443 for web access plus any other required ports) to the private IP of your LAN server IP. You will, in either case, need a Split DNS (plus a valid FQDN in the hosts file) set-up for Zimbra to be able to resolve it's LAN IP address.

[smg]

Originally Posted by phoenix

You can actually point your MX records at your public IP then forward port 25 (and 443 for web access plus any other required ports) to the private IP of your LAN server IP. You will, in either case, need a Split DNS (plus a valid FQDN in the hosts file) set-up for Zimbra to be able to resolve it's LAN IP address.

Hmmm... Forwarding port 25 would affect all domains on my external server and is therefore out of the question.

[soxfan]

What about using the Split Domain setup as the basis of your installation? Typically used for migrations, but is seems to fit your requirements. You'll have to figure out how to forward email from your qmail server, but other than that it should be pretty straightforward.