Ideal ESX setup

[pikeman94]

Hello all!

I am long-time lurker. Soon I will have some decent hardware to run Network Edition. I was thinking of putting this on VMWare ESX. However, I am leary of doing so as the last time I didn't that Zimbra would consistently crash. At the time I was told this was due to the fact that Zimbra makes a tremendous amount of disk writes and that the disk sub-system was my problem. I had a Compaq G0 380 with 4 GB of RAM and 4 18GB SCSI disks configured in a RAID 5. From there I put ESX on it and then created my Zimbra guest. Is there a best practice out there using Zimbra with ESX? If so, what is the recommendation? Any input would be most appreciative.

Pikeman94

[phoenix]

There should be the same consideration for performance as on a bar metal server, lots of RAM and RAID10 (if you're using RAID). I suppose a more detailed answer would depend on whether you will have many users, if so then check the wiki for some tuning articles (and there's some advice in the forums), for starters:

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Large Deployments - Zimbra :: Wiki
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Single-Server 100-500 User Systems - Zimbra :: Wiki
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Large Deployments 6.0 - Zimbra :: Wiki