NEW POLL: What OS port should be next?

[FunkyPenguin]

What about supporting 64bit versions of - RHEL4; FC3; FC4; SLES9, SUSE10?

Also what about supporting RHEL3? A vast majority of companies already have RHEL3 rolled out and are very happy with it, and they don't see the need for moving onto RHEL4.

EDIT: Can you confirm if you will be supporting the soon to be released SLES10? Hopefully you can as it is based on SUSE10 similar to RHEL4/FC3

[KevinH]

64bit is something we'll get too. RHEL3 is a no go. It runs the older kernel and we do not have any plans to allow folks to install new mail servers on such an old OS. IMHO is much better for us to lean forward on OS support than try to back port to OS's that are years old. Lucky for you the code is open source so if you *must* support such environment you can port it yourself. Zimbra however doesn't plan to port or support it. SLES10 we will support. As you know we already support ES9. Funny that you ask us to go back in time on Red Hat but forward on SuSE

Cake and eat it too?

[FunkyPenguin]

It wasn't so much wanting my cake and eat it, but more of discussing what I see in the market.

SUSE is my distro of preference, but as RedHat is the dominant distro and one that I have to deal with regularily I thought I would ask .

[mudrii]

Gentoo, as I understand it, is for bleeding edge folks who like to build things themselves.

We provide source. Build away.

Enterprises, who are our target (remember, we're a company) aren't likely to deploy on gentoo.

I can not be agree with the statement above.
As in my company we run many Gentoo servers for us and our clients and my friends from other companies runs many many servers on gentoo because it easy to maintain in long run and is not so bleeding edge as you mention, it was 2 years ago but not any more.

Is nice to have a Gentoo ebuild in the official tree for zimbra.

Kind regards
mudrii

[KevinH]

Is nice to have a Gentoo ebuild in the official tree for zimbra.

Source is there so should be easy to create an ebuild or submit the patches to make this happen.

[KevinH]

BTW: How many user's do you or your company plan to deploy on Zimbra+Gentoo?

[mudrii]

BTW: How many user's do you or your company plan to deploy on Zimbra+Gentoo?

As a CTO I am considering to test it first and if it will fulfill our requirements certainly we will deploy zimbra full version for us or our clients.

[KevinH]

As a CTO I am considering to test it first and if it will fulfill our requirements certainly we will deploy zimbra full version for us or our clients.

Your plan makes complete sense. Just trying to get an idea of the size of the deployment. We here at Zimbra want to support all the OS's which our customers and the community thinks is needed. That said we have limited resources so can't make all the ports a priority. For example if a customer comes to us with thousands of prospective mailboxes then it will raise the priority of a port. This has been the case with MacOSX and SuSE. No need to respond here in a public forum but if you (or anyone else) is has a special port/OS need for a large deployment then it would help confirm/adjust our priorities. sales@zimbra.com will field this input and keeps a running tally of who and how many people(mailboxes) are interested in a certain port.

[unilogic]

Arch Linux is a great OS. Maybe a build for this?

Ben

[daimer77]

Hello. Just my cents to the discussion. Without any intentions in escalating the OS war, I must say that from a Bussiness perspective, it seems totally weird to me that Solaris has no higher priority as a port.

My points go here:

1) Solaris is considered mature, secure and stable for around 20 years.

2) Althoug open sourced, Solaris still has enormous support options, which makes the leaders/chiefs and and people with responsibllity feel safe when choosing Solaris as production OS.

3) With a Solaris port Zimbra would be considered a serious competitive MS exchange replacer. A status linux will never gain since it still has "garage nerd" status among large companies and non-it-experts. Linux (Debian) is a good product but large Companies would never consider Linux in a production environment. Large companies rely their production on software and services which are backed up, by big and strong companies, which will also exist on the market tomorrow.

4) Solaris has Zones which are a very very fast variation of virtualization. It runs almost at native speed, hence eliminating the security riscs, and make multiple zimbra installations on same physical machine possible.

5) Business -> Earning money... People using/buying Solaris are used to the fact that solid and supported software is not cheap. With that said I personally believe that people already using Solaris don't mind paying for a good mail/exchange solution, as long as they know it is well supported. The point is that porting Zimbra to Solaris will open a huge new market, with companies willing to pay for software and services which can be deployed on Solaris.

Have a nice easter, Best regards, Daniel Mersebak