Virtualization Zimbra

[uxbod]

Personally I do not see the reason for that RFE. If I was to install ZCS NE on a RHEL5 platform I would expect it to be officially supported whether virtualised or not. Hey, if you were to load ZCS on a remote server how would you know it was not virtualised anyway

[patit]

I might agree with you, in theory... but if you ask support they will tell you it is not "officially" supported . And considering the trend about virtualization it seems awkward that Zimbra is not giving official support yet. I know Zimbra works well in virtualized environments (be it VMware, XEN, Virtual Iron or others), and I know there are many users running it in the same environments (also NE). So why don't just take record of the situation and go for support in the future releases?

[uxbod]

Where does it say it will not be supported ? If a Zimbra employee could clarify the situation would be great. So if I was to phone up and said "Yes I am running ZCS 5 on RHEL5" would that be different to "Yes I am running ZCS 5 on RHEL5 (though I have no idea if the server is actually virtualised as I do not manage it)"

[patit]

Where does it say it will not be supported ? If a Zimbra employee could clarify the situation would be great. So if I was to phone up and said "Yes I am running ZCS 5 on RHEL5" would that be different to "Yes I am running ZCS 5 on RHEL5 (though I have no idea if the server is actually virtualised as I do not manage it)"

Ask support! I mean I asked support before buying NE as almost all my servers are virtual. As you know VMware is an operating system (ESX version) running on bare metal. And although now almost all vendors support their products in a virtualized OS it's not always been like that (I remember well, just a couple of years ago, asking support to M$ or Oracle and receiving the fatal answer "it's not supported"). I think the reason they don't support it officially is just that, though minimal, there are some differences between running an OS on bare metal and on a VM (the hypervisor, whichever it is, plays its role). As I stated before I think that many people are already running Zimbra on virtualized servers, so I think that it's about time recognize this situation and support it. In the end I guess it could also widen Zimbra adoption.

[jrv]

Some VMs do not pass guest disk flushes to the host. The effect can be to re-order writes around fences from the guest's perspective. This may be a serious problem for databases.

VirtualBox documents that by default they ignore flushes from the guest, but they have a way to disable this behavior so that flushes are honored.

I suspect that VMware Fusion ignore flushes based on experiences with several lost ZFS pools. I don't know if VMware documents Fusion's behavior.

I'm using ZCS 5.0.10 on Ubuntu 8.04.1 inside VirtualBox 2.0.4 on a Mac Mini 10.5.5 host. Runs fine, but it's not loaded (single user, 2,000 spams per day).

[mrcoffe]

If you want to use VMware, use the ESX version. It's free since october 2008 and it will perform better then the other free 'vmware server' version, which has to run on top of an OS (preferably Linux without X-Windows).

You can boot VMware ESX from a USB Memory Stick, it works like a charm and is really fast.
Comparing VMware to the Microsoft Virtualisation product I definitely would go for VMware when taking a look at performance and stability. VMware is still more mature.
I have no experience with ZEN so I cant say anything about this.

[uxbod]

From what I have read Xen certainly outperforms VMware.

[merrill]

I've opened a new RFE to ask for official support for VMware deployment, whatever the guest OS.

Fell free to vote Bug 32610 – Official support for deployments on VMware

The RFE has only one comment, so I don't think it's getting much traction with the Zimbra support team.

We have a ZCS NE server running on physical hardware, but we'd like to migrate it into a virtual server on our ESX cluster. How many folks are running production Zimbra installations on ESX clusters? Are there specific gotchas of which we should be aware?

[uxbod]

A good thread to read :- Zimbra performance under Xen vs VMwareServer