LiveCD & VMWare Appliance

[KevinH]

UPDATE: Official Zimbra VMWare build is now available at: http://www.zimbra.com/vmware/



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We've now got a LiveCD (500 MB) and a VMWare Appliance (1.5 GB) up on the download page. These aren't recommended for production use and are of demo quality only. Basically enough to download, run and have a portable demo or playground.

Downloads

The LiveCD one is super cool IMHO. It come's pre-loaded with some sample messages, Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird with preconfigured IMAP accounts, and a quick readme. Lets you send mail back and forth to the local test users or out to the internet if you've got a connected machine.


Thanks to Marc for putting these together! Please post your feedback or comments. If you find a problem please file a bug in bugzilla.

[mubley]

I started playing with the VMware appliance yesterday and was very impressed. I am downloading the LiveCD right now.

An option that I ran across the other day is running a LiveCD in the VMware Player using the VM and steps located here:
http://www.vmwarez.com/2006/02/livec...l-machine.html
This was intended mainly for developers who DON'T release VMware appliances but DO release LiveCDs. Since Zimbra offers both a VMware appliance and a LiveCD, running the LiveCD on VMware Player is not as valuable. However, I can think of a few advantages of doing so:

• The Zimbra LiveCD download is smaller than the Zimbra VMware appliance.
• As KevinH mentioned, the Zimbra LiveCD is pre-configured with more features and selling points than the Zimbra VMware appliance.
• If you already have the VMware player installed, then you can run the Zimbra LiveCD without having to reboot your PC or find another PC.

Congratulations to the Zimbra team for coming up with more innovative ways of showing off their amazing achievements!

[mubley]

A quick note about memory requirement: the Zimbra LiveCD will not run on machines with 512MB RAM (the Mailbox service fails to start). I recommend, at minimum, 768MB RAM since you're trying to run Zimbra, X, KDE, and Firefox with three tabs open. If using the VMware Player as I describe above, you can change the memory allocation:

• inside VMware Player by clicking Player, Troubleshoot, Change Memory Allocation
  OR
• by editing the .vmx file and changing the memsize setting