Configuration advice: test deployment

[taupehat]

Hi all. I'm looking very closely at moving our mail infrastructure over to Zimbra, and am wanting to do a test deployment to be sure it's going to fit and not break things. Here's how the relevant parts of our domain work currently:

• DC1.example.com - LDAP and Samba domain controller (running Debian)

• mail.example.com - dovecot/postfix/squirrelmail server (also running Debian, uses pam_ldap for authentication of users)

I've got no special need to stick with Debian (other than I like it for a lot of things), and in fact have a vmware partition running RHEL4.0:

• pilot.example.com - running nothing yet, will be FC4 or since I really dislike using redhat, probably SLES or Debian

What I'd like to do for the purposes of this test deployment is to enable the Zimbra server to run quietly on pilot, using DC1 to authenticate via LDAP and using mail to retrieve and store messages using IMAP only so that messages don't go away from the production server. Assuming all goes well, I'll use it myself for a few days, then give the info to a few other people who've been wanting to use calendaring primarily, and if all goes well after a few weeks, move the thing onto its own opteron box and make it the production mailserver.

I've seen stuff in the forums about domain splitting, but that's not quite what I want to do - the mailserver that exists would still be the mailserver for any user using Zimbra. Zimbra initially would simply be an IMAP client to mail that would store calendaring data locally.

Does anyone have a staged deployment scenario like this for Zimbra?

Cheers.

[KevinH]

The Zimbra web UI doesn't talk IMAP(it talks SOAP to the Zimbra server). You'd need to use imapsync to keep your current message store in-sync with Zimbra's IMAP store.

[KevinH]

Another idea would be to use imapsync initially and then forward a copy of new mail to Zimbra to keep it updated.