High Availability

[tabmow]

Hi,

Could someone list or point me in the right direction ways of setting Zimbra up in a High Availability Cluster. What I mean exactly is that I want to have N+1 redundancy across my whole Zimbra installation. If 1 particular server goes down, I don't want to lose any access to the service whatsoever for customers. The only way (if I am reading correctly) is to use Redhat clustering feature... is this correct?

Surely having a product which is in direct competition with Microsoft Exchange has such a feature or at the very least is on its roadmap moving forward?

[phoenix]

Could someone list or point me in the right direction ways of setting Zimbra up in a High Availability Cluster. What I mean exactly is that I want to have N+1 redundancy across my whole Zimbra installation. If 1 particular server goes down, I don't want to lose any access to the service whatsoever for customers. The only way (if I am reading correctly) is to use Redhat clustering feature... is this correct?

The only currently supported method is to use Red Hat Cluster Suite and that's only with Zimbra NE. You could search the forums for 'DRBD'.

[Klug]

Or use some virtual machines and rely on the VM management tools suite to achieve HA.

[tabmow]

Ok, so what is the usual plan for corporations or service providers that require this sort of High Availability? Do they use VMware or Redhat Clustering / DRBD? Is HA within Zimbra itself on the roadmap at all? Obviously since it is a VMware owned company now are we just left to focus on only 3rd party solutions for HA, typically VMware related?

[dgamez]

Phoenix, I've only found HA setup for ZCS NE 4.x. Is there any newer guide?

I'm using ZCS NE and RHCS.

[phoenix]

Phoenix, I've only found HA setup for ZCS NE 4.x. Is there any newer guide?

I'm afraid the only guides available are in the forums or wiki.

[Gruic]

I'm afraid the only guides available are in the forums or wiki.

\

Seriously, you VMWare folks need to write HA guides that do not involve VMWare as the solution for HA clustering of Zimbra. When I bought the network edition your sales folks said it supported HA out of the box, but later I find out when trying to get the docs from Zimbra support, I was told the only docs were from NE4.0. This was totally unacceptable

So here we are with Zimbra NE v8.0 and your HA now involves purchasing VMWare. Zimbra claims it's cheaper to run than MS-Exchange, but when you look at all the extra stuff you have to buy to get HA abilities because they're not out of the box, either VMWare or RedHat Cluster Suite, you need to stop and think twice. MS-Exchange *WILL* do HA out of the box.

Just my two cents on this (sore) subject to me.

[phoenix]

Seriously, you VMWare folks ......

We are not VMWare folks' we are moderators on these forums and we post here voluntarily and we have no affiliation with VMWare other than as users of these forums.

[iway]

Well, I'll have to side with Gruic. Zimbra HA or Server-To-Server-Sync has been promised for quite some time, and the workaround using Vmware instances is not suitable for many installations - not even considering the useless overhead needed for virtualization.

[shanxt]

The official NE docs by Zimbra have docs on how to setup single-node and multi-node clusters, for version 7.x. They can be found here.
Just scroll down to 'cluster resources'. Is this what you guys are looking for?

I have used it to setup a two-node cluster with RHCS at a couple of places, and it is actually quite easy. Zimbra even generates the cluster.conf file. The only editing required was that I was using HP's ILO as a fencing device, so had to manually enter that in the conf file. (Manually because I found luci+ricci really buggy.)