Test Zimbra Server in Conjunction with Live Server

[soxfan]

In anticipation of the first beta release of Zimbra 5.0, I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the best way to run a test Zimbra server in conjunction with a live, production Zimbra server. I'd love to be able to try out the beta and RC releases so that I can show off some of the upcoming features that our users have been waiting for, as well as help the community by identifying and troubleshooting bugs. But I'm not sure I want to go through the trouble of setting up a test/dummy email domain. Maybe that's the only way to do it though. Ideally I'd like to have a test account or two in the live domain, and somehow funnel email for those accounts over to the test server. That way we could test the real world environment (sending and receiving both internal and external (Internet) email).

We are currently running the FOSS version 4.5.5 on CentOS, with 200+ active users. Definitely don't want to do anything that would hurt the production environment in any way.

[phoenix]

Wouldn't a split domain allow you to test it as a secondary server with the aim of migrating users to it or just upgrading your primary at some time?

[glitch23]

Thats pretty much what I currently do, I have 2 setups that mimic each other, one is production and one is for testing, all upgrades since version 3 are tested on the latter. I setup a few accounts on the production one, to always forward to the test server, and I send replies from the test server with the identity of the production server account. So people replying don't get confused and think I started working for another company.

This obviously requires 2 domains and 2 separate MX records, though I find it to be the best way to find hiccups in any release.

[soxfan]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm in a split domain setup now, with the old email server being the primary server. I should be able to forward to the test server instead of the live server for a few accounts. Once I get rid of our old server I'll have to look at it again. I've always thought of the Split Domain setup as something to help migration, but it should work for a Test/Live scenario too.