Is Mini-ITX viable ?

[uxbod]

Have decided to consolidate some of my home server kit, as my dual Opteron Xen setup is getting a bit hot in the office So started to look at running Zimbra on a Mini-ITX setup in a 1U rackmount enclosure. Now until now it would appear most boards would only support 1GB RAM, but now the VIA Nano and Intel ATOM are out it would seem 2GB is possible

So with a 1.6GHz dual core Intel ATOM and 2GB RAM do you think this would quite happily support a ZCS installation of up to 5 users ? I think it would do this just fine, and would make a nice SOHO setup for minimal cost and a low carbon footprint to boot

What do you reckon ?

[Klug]

I have a OSE ZCS running with stg like 20 accounts on them (for friends/testing purpose) on a dual P3 1 GHz with 2GB of memory (and a 4x36 GB RAID10).

They're happy with it.

Once again the MTA is the most CPU consuming so filtering "before" delivery to the ZCS helped a lot.

As an Atom 1.6 GHz works better than a P3 1 GHz, I think this is a usable solution for "home" (I read Atom 1.6 GHz run as good as a 1.2 GHz Pentium Mobile).

[p24t]

I've got a copy of ZCS going on a Duron 1100, with about 512M in it. It's slow as a dog but it works well. I imagine 2GB of ram and a faster proc would do well.

[uxbod]

I reckon so as I have it currently running under Xen with 2GB allocated and it works a dream. New boards appear to support Gb-E aswell so the potential for NAS/iSCSI is there aswell. Hmm .... Zimbra, MailScanner, Asterisk and Web sites all running on a couple of 1Us with ATOMs and a shared storage backend Wonder if I can get that past the missus ... think of our reduced carbon footprint sweetheart

[Klug]

The Atom ITX motherboard is sooooooooo cheap you can buy one and try 8)
Intel D945GCLF (with integrated Atom 1.6Ghz CPU) BOX *new*

[uxbod]

Yeah The problem with the Intel one though is that the heatsink is to high for a 1U rackmount, hence looking at the JetWay aswell. Plus, the new JetWay will allow additional module addons via a daughterboard.

I reckon for a SOHO setup it would be pretty good in a small cab.

[kazooless]

I am using an Intel D945GCLF2D with Ubuntu 8.04 & the latest Zimbra open source release. I use the server for Zimbra and a home file server with both Apple & Windows file sharing. Attached is a slimline DVD+RW & Seagate 1TB drive and it has 2GB RAM.

I am very please with this setup. It has been stable and there are no complaints of speed. It is not overly utilized though, as I am the primary user at home, but my wife and children use it occasionally for file sharing, and always for DNS.

The server receives 2,000 to 3,000 smtp connections per day, most of which are blacklisted. Of the 100 that make it through each day, about 33% is legit.

CPU utilization is almost always nil and it hasn't crashed on me once.

Hope that helps.

kazoo

[fernandoflorez]

I had my home setup under a dual celeron with 2 GB. It was working correctly except for a couple of occasions where the it crashes because of the log rotation crons.

Can you compare zimbra 5.x and then 6.x and see if you have better results under 6.x?

Cheers!

[ryandball]

The reason I ask is I remember when I worked for the (then) largest ISP in the northwest in late 2000, they had 3 Sun servers for email doing round robin, running SunOS I believe, and I think they were only like 80 MHz with 512 MB RAM, but they handled email for 50,000 customers and only got slow when we got hit by massive spam storms (like millions at a time).

Now granted, I realize that a) this was years ago and spam has grown exponentially since then and b) they were not running a collaboration suite, just basic email and mailing list services, but still, 50,000 customers on servers that were very old even by 2000 standards.

I also remember around 2002 working at another ISP and we bought a smallish ISP out. We moved their mail server into our office and that little whitebox by itself was supporting probably 5,000 customers, and it was an old piece of crap.

My dedicated Zimbra NE server here at work supports 49 users, and it's got 4 GB RAM and a quad-core 64-bit CPU AND STILL runs quite slow at times... Amazing..

[Bill Brock]

Just put together a Jetway MB, 780G with AMD 5050e, 4GB DDR2 800 SO-DIMMS, 640 GB Caviar Green HD, 300W PSU in Mini ITX case. It is very quiet and very cool running. It performs as well as any of my ATX systems running similar AMD Athlon X2's.

If I were going to run it as a server I would probably opt for the veloci-raptor or ESATA drive which it supports.