New install , multi servers or not ?

[berjos]

Hi

I have been given the pleasure of looking into zimbra so that my company may start to use it instead of horde/exim. So far its looking really good and i have a test server up & running where i have migriated some users and it all seems to work perfectly.

So now im looking a bit more into the actual soultion we would install. We got about 2600 registerd mail users. Of course the wont all be using mail at the same time. We are talking about a single domain. I would say that the company is fairly avareage when it comes to sending/reciving mail. So i have a couple of questions :

1. With this amount of users/accounts would it be advisable to split this up in more then 1 server ?

2. Is it fully possible to split/add another mailbox storage & or mta server later on ? If we need more juice. We intend to use the open source edition.

3. Would mailbox sharing etc work between 2 different mailbox storage servers ? as far i can understand from the forums you would need to divide the users between the servers.

4. What kind of hardware is recommended to run the server(s) on ? Should it be a physical server , or could some run on vmware for instance ? And what kind of cpu,ram etc are we looking at. I suppose this would differ from server types if we splitt them up.

Any feedback is really appriciated

Sorry for my spelling but english is really not my strong side.

[bdial]

Originally Posted by berjos

1. With this amount of users/accounts would it be advisable to split this up in more then 1 server ?

not really a yes or no question as you have kind of suggested. would depend a lot on if you're using as/av on the server or not. or if people will be using pop/imap or not. with the right hardware you could probably run a single server doing just ldap/mailbox/basic mta with that many suers just using webmail.

2. Is it fully possible to split/add another mailbox storage & or mta server later on ? If we need more juice. We intend to use the open source edition.

yes

3. Would mailbox sharing etc work between 2 different mailbox storage servers ? as far i can understand from the forums you would need to divide the users between the servers.

users would be on different mailbox servers, but sharing and things like that work across mailbox servers. you can even setup zimbra-proxy to make it all transparent to the end user.

4. What kind of hardware is recommended to run the server(s) on ? Should it be a physical server , or could some run on vmware for instance ? And what kind of cpu,ram etc are we looking at. I suppose this would differ from server types if we splitt them up.

the more ram the better. definately 64bit, if you're going to try to do 2600 users i'd say 16GB of ram at least. you can run in vmware (we do)