server specs question

[traaidmark]

hey guys, the company i work for has decided that they will go with zimbra solution as one of our email domains is giving us a lot of hassles.

This is going to be used for approx. 1200 addresses, which is currently running on linux, and using squirrelmail web client.

Is it possible to (1) import the current data over to new zimbra server?
and (2) what server specs do you guys reccommend?

im not a technician, im a designer, and VERY new to this, but i did promis to take over this project, so i will be asking a lot of stupid little questions

[joshuamorgan]

hey there,

whilst there isn't specs yet, zimbra do recommend systems with ram > 512MB. swap partition should of course be double the size of your ram.

64-bit isn't also supported but should theoretically work if you compile from source.

you may want to load-balance your system a bit. ie. have one ldap server, one mta, one frontend - this ensures that not all services are running on the one server, choking the cpu - you could then add more servers to increase scalability, availability and reduce single point-of-failure.

[KevinH]

Josh is right on. I'll add a bit more.

For a production install I'd reccomend at least a dual CPU box with 2GB of RAM. You'll also want to have multiple disks so you can setup RAID. In general email systems are IO bound so you can never have too many disks. To give you an idea of what a produciton quality machine config looks like this is what our demo system uses:

Operating System: Red Hat ES 4.0
Processor: Dual AMD Opteron 244 Processors
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 73 GB SCSI X 6
RAID: RAID 10
Chassis: *2U Chassis

The most important factor is of course the use profile of your users. I'm going to list a few questions which will help us determine that.

Will users use IMAP, POP, or just the AJAX web UI)?

What is the average size of the mailboxes:
- Number of messages?
- Number of bytes stored?
- Average message size?

How active are the users:
- Number of users logged in at peak hour?
- Number of messages sent total for the peak hour?
- Number of messages recieved for the peak hour?
- Total number of messages sent/recieved each day?