New Installation recommendations

[Guest]

Hello all

having been playing with Zimbra and being very impressed with the cross compatibility between Mac and PC and so I am planning for real deployment.

I just wanted to check that what i was planning made sense after pawing my my through most of the threads on here

for aprox 2000 users with 500Mb - 1Gb mail quota.

Dell 2950 2x Quad core with 6x450Gb SAS 15K drives Raid 10, 16Gb Ram

RHEL 5, 64 Bit

Authentication to a AD and a script to run in cron to pull/delete users into Zimbra from the AD

POP turned off (IMAP only) main connectivity = browser

Backups Saved on a share off the main system.

No Exchange ever used.

So the questions...

Is the hardware enough to deal with the users? I dont want people complaining about the speed.

How easy to expand in year 2 to a SAN / Cluster? Services split out (MTA,LDAP etc)

Can i create a "Model Desktop" create extra folders/calenders on peoples "desktops" before they and after they have logged into there mail without having to log into 2000 accounts ?

All help appreciated

[jpbuse]

Originally Posted by Guest

for aprox 2000 users with 500Mb - 1Gb mail quota.

Dell 2950 2x Quad core with 6x450Gb SAS 15K drives Raid 10, 16Gb Ram

I don't think this will give you enough space for what you are trying to do. You will end up with 1.3TB w/o any hot spares with this configuration. If you have 2000 users at 1GB each, you're pushing 2TBs of storage needed, at least at some point. An option would be to do 3x 450GB 15SAS in a RAID1 + a hot spare then either put in 3x 1TB SATA/SAS drives in RAID 5 to give you 2TB for HSM or go with an external MD1000 have much more storage options and scalability for the future.

Check out this thread as I asked the same questions for the most part. I have ~60 users at around 15GB each. RAID setup for ~50 users

[Guest]

hi jpbuse

Thanks for the reply...

I am looking at this in a two fold kind of way....

I can limit the majority of users to 500M and only have a couple hundred on 1G.... I should just about be able to squeeze in .... and i am only looking at year 1 storage....

For year 2 goto a full SAN investment and not have to worry about storage again

I looked at the SATA option but i am worried about speed .... that seems to be more of an issue than storage... with the storage, worst case, buy some more split mailboxes ... with the speed it could be a bigger issue out of the starting gate so to speak and it worries me with the number of users.

[jpbuse]

Definitely check out the thread I mentioned as it talks about HSM. Your HSM would go onto the slower SATA drives as that email is not accessed as frequently. HSM is the way to go for this type of setup. SAS 15K for the primary store and SATA for the secondary HSM store.

The MD1000 option would give you a lot of options as well w/o having to go with a SAN setup. You could add the MD1000 to the 2950 at anytime down the road and load it with a combo of SAS/SATA depending on what you need.

[Klug]

Originally Posted by jpbuse

If you have 2000 users at 1GB each, you're pushing 2TBs of storage needed, at least at some point.

I don't think so.

ZCS is smart in the way it stores attachement : if a mail with attached files is sent to X users on the server, the files are only store once on the filesystem (while they're used in each users's quota calculation).

Originally Posted by jpbuse

An option would be to do 3x 450GB 15SAS in a RAID1 + a hot spare then either put in 3x 1TB SATA/SAS drives in RAID 5 to give you 2TB for HSM or go with an external MD1000 have much more storage options and scalability for the future.

I'd rather go with :
2 x 146 (or 300) GB SAS 15K in RAID1 for OS + binaries + logs + store/indexes (what needs to be fast).
2 x 1 TB SAS NearLine 7.2K in RAID1 for HSM (as long as you're using Network Edition, obviously)

However this brings to a problem with backup, you can not do it on the same server...

If you want/need to do backup on the same server, maybe you can use either :
. one PowerEdge 1900/T610 (5U) with everything internal
. one PowerEdge 1950/R610 (1U) with 4 x 2.5" SAS 15K HD (either 146 or 300GB) internal and one external MD1000 with enough 500GB (or 750GB or 1TB) NearLine disks

[jpbuse]

Originally Posted by Klug

ZCS is smart in the way it stores attachement : if a mail with attached files is sent to X users on the server, the files are only store once on the filesystem (while they're used in each users's quota calculation).

Is there a way to really be sure and know? What if his email usage is different and doesn't have the same recipients w/ the attachments? I mean, if he's planning a server now wouldn't it be better to plan storage for "worse case" scenario? Good to know Zimbra is smart in storing attachments though... very cool.

[Klug]

Of course, in a "worst case" scenario, you're right.

If the 2000 users are a single company with people working together, it should not be that bad 8))

[jpbuse]

I work for an advertising agency... so worse case always applies! My users have 15GB quotes are still complain.

I like the 2950 route w/ 2x 15K drives in raid1 + a hot spare, then 2x 1TB drives in raid1 + hot spare for HSM. I believe the poster said backups will be handled by another machine. This gets you by for the year then can expand if needed with either a SAN solution or a MD1000 loaded w/ necessary drives.

I ended up with a 2950, dual proc, dual power, 16GB, w/ 2x 450GB 15k raid1 + HS for everything at the moment. Backups are handled over NFS. Not using HSM at the moment but will re-eval my storage needs in 6 months. I've got 3 open slots in the 2950 that I can use for NL SAS for the HSM. I didn't want to drop the $$ for the over priced SATA/SAS drives for these machines right now. I found drives elsewhere but of course Dell won't support. Figured I can just wait a little bit.

[Guest]

Originally Posted by Klug

If the 2000 users are a single company with people working together, it should not be that bad 8))

they are and we can and sometimes do talk

Well thank you all for being so helpful...

So the only down side with the setup for 2000 users as far as everyone has commented is with the storage....

Should the storage be an issue then something else could be plugged in to increases capacity....

My users will be going from a quota of 50Mb to 500 so a factor of 10 to keep all happy.

only 500 max will ever get the 1G mailbox so 1.25Tb Maxed out which I cannot imagine (just watch it happen ) in the first year.

I want to ease myself into a new system (and my users) and then build it up as it becomes used more and more...

The backups would start on the same box and then go to another server via NFS after a couple of months .... once the system is running...

or

Looking into a iSCSI SAN with 7200 SATA drives for storage (another project) but that could end up being added if the storage was proving a issues and would give me a secure place for the backups to sit....the SAN in the future (next year) would be a pair of SAS SAN units with Clustering... but that is also amalgamating a couple of other high end projects.

All the help appreciated

[Guest]

Does any one know about creating a "model desktop" so when a user logs in for the first time they already have a;

Group Calender
Planner Calender

Folder for stuff
another folder

if i can crack this last section then i will be a very happy chap.

oh and seeing someone's schedule in ical...... and.....