Mirroring Mailbox servers over WAN

[algoman]

Hi all,
I ask you for advice: I'm planning a central Zimbra cluster with all bells and whistles in Datacenter but I've a branch office with not-so-good connectivity which hosts a half of users (about 500) and the most active ones. They will have, of course a MTA on their premises BUT is it possible to hava a mirrored or mirroring server for their mailboxes ? In other words: Colud be possible for them have their traffic as local so if a guy sends a doc of 3 MBytes to the guy at his side the message doesn't have to travel twice but only once (to be synchronized on the datacenter copy of the mailbox ?

Thanks!

Cheers

Guglielmo

[Rich Graves]

No, not really suppported.

Consider whether caching clients like zimbra desktop, outlook+zco, or thunderbird+lightning would mitigate the need for a low latency/high reliability connection to the server. And put the time/money saved by not maintaining a branch office mailbox server into a network upgrade, which I'm sure will be appreciated regardless. Use a simple local file server rather than email for the 3MB+ attachment case.

If you really need a replicaed server, you could experiment with DRDB; others here have, though mostly in hobbyist rather than business environments.

There are several SAN vendors who would be happy to sell you something that supports asynchronous replication... for a price.

[algoman]

Originally Posted by Rich Graves

No, not really suppported.

Consider whether caching clients like zimbra desktop, outlook+zco, or thunderbird+lightning would mitigate the need for a low latency/high reliability connection to the server. And put the time/money saved by not maintaining a branch office mailbox server into a network upgrade, which I'm sure will be appreciated regardless. Use a simple local file server rather than email for the 3MB+ attachment case.

Rich, oh you, lucky man... Don't know that mail is the preferred average user file server ?

If you really need a replicaed server, you could experiment with DRDB; others here have, though mostly in hobbyist rather than business environments.

No, not at all, and for sure the traffic wouldn't be that smaller, was looking for some sort of "intelligent LMTP"

There are several SAN vendors who would be happy to sell you something that supports asynchronous replication... for a price.

Heee and what price!

Thanks anyway

Gu

[dijichi2]

I ask you for advice: I'm planning a central Zimbra cluster with all bells and whistles in Datacenter but I've a branch office with not-so-good connectivity which hosts a half of users (about 500) and the most active ones. They will have, of course a MTA on their premises BUT is it possible to hava a mirrored or mirroring server for their mailboxes ? In other words: Colud be possible for them have their traffic as local so if a guy sends a doc of 3 MBytes to the guy at his side the message doesn't have to travel twice but only once (to be synchronized on the datacenter copy of the mailbox ?

yes, this is what subdomains are for. install a seperate zimbra server at the remote end and create a subdomain for the branch. any delivery to that subdomain should only travel locally and not out onto the wire. simple.

[algoman]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

yes, this is what subdomains are for. install a seperate zimbra server at the remote end and create a subdomain for the branch. any delivery to that subdomain should only travel locally and not out onto the wire. simple.

Yes, I know. I think I'm not a newbie The problem is not feasibility but high availability, access mail also when the WAN link to the branch office server is down. Please read all the thread, I think Rich got the point.

Best

Guglielmo

[dijichi2]

Yes, I know. I think I'm not a newbie

well you should be able to work it out from this thread then

The problem is not feasibility but high availability, access mail also when the WAN link to the branch office server is down. Please read all the thread, I think Rich got the point.

with a seperate subdomain install, if your wan link goes down people in the branch office can still access/send mail internally so what's the problem? mail will queue at either end and get delivered when the link comes back up, seems a simple and ideal solution to the problem.

a seperate subdomain install which is then replicated at a block level back to the central office would allow for local delivery of large attachments, and some kind of HA to central office although the complexity would outweigh the benefits imho.

alternatively you could investigate manually setting transport options for each mailbox - this will allow you fine-grain control over how mail gets delivered to each mailbox. but no HA. there is no replicated HA in Zimbra really, it was originally stated as goal at the time of the first public betas but never saw the light of day.