Initial configuration and growth planning...

[jasonalexander]

I really haven't seen a sliding scale graph or chart of average hardware requirements per 25, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 5000, etc. users. Does anything like that exist?

I'm on the path to creating a small email service for my clients and intend to continue selling it and make it as big as possible. The main concern for me is speed for clients and reliability.

I have plans to pick up some pretty redundant hardware for my servers, and I know that anything can go wrong with a single unit, so if one intends to get into this business, they better have something that can take over in the event of a failure of the main units. So, that being said, is something like the Red Hat clustering solution indicated as a barest necessity as far as high-availability goes? Any recommendations? Or, is it possible to just have a server on standby and watch the main one like a hawk? Or can a shared storage be used and active-passive server relationship be used?

As for storage, I am not sure how to proceed. I suspect that some simple RAID 1 storage will work for the mailboxes and databases and when I max-out the capabilities, I'll have enough cash in the door to drop the cash on a solid storage solution.

Not even sure how much CPU power I'm going to need to push this service.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
J

[LMStone]

Hi Jason,

We are a Zimbra Hosting Provider and see this question pop up on the forums a fair amount.

The short answer is that there is no "right" answer because how your users will use Zimbra impacts CPU/RAM/Disk resource consumption greatly.

So, for example, you could have several thousand light users on a simple quad-core pizza box and do just fine. Alternatively, we've seen the same hardware brought to its knees with a few hundred power users.

Since you know your users better than we will, I'd recommend reading the Performance wiki articles for large deployments, take a stab at a configuration and post it here for feedback.

Hope that helps!

All the best,
Mark

[jasonalexander]

That gives me something to go on. Thanks Mr. Mark! ;-)