5 or 6 for a new install

[Des]

Which version would you recommend for a new installation? I intend to run a small server for no more than 15 users.

[dalmate]

If you want to use, you should use 5 because in this moment, 6 has some problems (but if you want to try you can use 6, too )
In fact, if you want to use 6 you should wait until they have 6.0.2 version

[Rich Graves]

My first choice would be none... for only 15 users, surely you'd be better off with a free or inexpensive off-site webmail.

While we are sticking with version 5 until at least mid-December, I would recommend starting with 6. It has issues, but most aren't going to be evident with only 15 users; and if you do run into bugs, your 15 users can work around them. 6 fixes a lot of silly things that have been bugging me under 5 (and 4!), like parsing of mailto: link arguments.

I don't think learning the intricacies of both 5 and 6 and managing the upgrade early next year is going to be worth your time.

[dave_kempe]

A small server for 15users you are better off with a hosted version of Network Edition frankly. I would recommend 6. We have had our issues with it, but none are particularly insurmountable, and a hosted version of network edition lets you just turn it on and go.
http://www.zimbra.com/partners/zimbra_hosting.html
plenty of hosting partners to choose from.
If its the FOSS version you want, hosting it yourself is easy enough and the setup of 5 vs 6 is basically the same.

[batfastad]

Sorry to chip in on this but we're looking at 10-15 users too. I looked at several hosting partners in the UK and also in Europe/USA.
It worked out more expensive than the $875 per year for the Network Pro Edition. And that lets us all have 20GB mailboxes too.

[LMStone]

As a hosting partner, I can tell you that large mailboxes increase our costs because not only do we need to provision disk space for the actual emails, but also for all of the backups, as well as for any Archiving and Discovery mailboxes.

We find we can't use inexpensive slow disks for large mailboxes because users who need large mailboxes are generally retrieving older emails very frequently and don't tolerate a slow Zimbra system. So, except for backups, all of our Zimbra disks are HP RAID10, which is as you know not the most inexpensive way to go.

Consequently, what we have found is that clients with a small number of very large mailboxes are sometimes better off with their own dedicated server. When we make a new quote for a prospective client, our model automatically tells us if it would be cheaper for the client to use a dedicated server instead of having their mailboxes on one of our shared servers.

Plus, the dedicated server allows for easy rebranding, which some clients also find has value.

Not trying to sell you here on the forums, but you may find it helpful to look at the Zimbra Partners page and ask a few partners for quotes to see what kind of deal you can get.

Email hosting and enterprise messaging hosted service providers of Zimbra software

And yes, in the interest of full disclosure, we are one of the Partners listed there.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[micheas]

@LMStone: I am a little curious about the need for high speed disks. I have medium speed satas on a DRBD drive with with DRBDs made of LVMs (equivilent to raid 10) and the speed is pretty consistently 120M/s for reads, although I don't have a lot of users, I do have some huge mailboxes. (300,000 generic emails, with half of them have > 100K attachments, is about normal) I have some performance issues, but nothing that I can trace to the drive in any way.

As I mentioned we have a small number of users (about 20) But the mailstore is about 30G. So the usage is fairly light, but a couple of users can put a huge load on the cluster.

My big question is, at what point do you find the drive being the limiting factor? (curious for mostly for future planning.)

Edit: back to the original question -

I would strongly recommend 6 for a small office, the twitter and other things social networking zimlets in 6 are just must haves, as you are competing with gmail for the minds of your users. For a small office the big advantage of the network edition over the open source edition is the live backup.

If you do not go with the network edition, look into a filesystem with snapshots (such as ZFS, or btfs) as the backup problem for email is thorny at best. Especially as you have multiple moving parts with Zimbra. Search the forums about backing up the community edition before deploying it.

[snake_eyes]

Hello,

I'm running zimbra FOS 5.0.11 since one year and it's working well, I was planing to upgrade the version to be 6.0.1 but I stopped depends on my reading in the forums about the failure and bugs in the 6.0.1, so I'm planing now to upgrade to 5.0.19 so is there any steps that can be help me to done this task?

Cheers,

[uxbod]

Take a cold backup of /opt/zimbra, make sure the backup is okay, and then perform the upgrade. Before any upgrade make sure all zimbra processes have indeed been terminated!