VMWare Image

[fondwey]

Just an idea:

VMware has just recently released a free player for vmware-virtual machines for Windows and Linux. It would be pretty cool if someone set up a base-vmware image with a linux-distro of choice and a ready-to-go zimbra installation for production-use. The player is free, even for commercial use. VMware even makes a few images available for download, for example a completely set-up Oracle Server The advantage of such a vmware-image is, that it could be used as-is in a productive environment. I think zimbra looks pretty cool and such a virtual machine would dramatically lower the barriers for testing and deploying it.

Just my 2 cents,

Fondwey.

[KevinH]

It would be hard for us to recomend or support running any production Zimbra install under a virtual machine. You lose too much in terms of performance and ability to debug. It may be nice to test/play with but not something we'd like folks going into production on. You can do some searches on the forums here and see that almost everyone who tried to install on vmware ran into problems or sluggish performance. Just my $0.02.

[pheitman]

FWIW M2 just installed cleanly on the VMWare image of RHEL 4.0 provided by RedHat for use with the vmplayer. All I had to do was

1) fix the fact that the image sets the MAC address of eth0 by editing /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

2) add an entry for the host in /etc/hosts to tell the image what ip address it was assigned by dhcp

3) stop sendmail

4) download zcs-3.0.0-M2-740.RHEL4.tgz

5) install according to the instructions

As stated above, I wouldn't use this for production but it is a nice way to evaluate the technology until I can install it easily on my Ubuntu server.

Peter

[rjedge]

M2 also installs and runs fine on VMWare ESX. We have it installed using an RHEL4 Update 2 template we created for new linux servers. It is currently 1 of 10 virtual servers running in an IBM Blade Center environment on 1 of 6 blade servers of which 5 blades have ESX with anywhere from 3 to 10 VM's running. Even with 10 VM's running on this 1 blade, it is still only showing 20-40% CPU useage overall.

We are running everything from MS SQL servers to web, file, print, and Exchange front end servers as well with very little performance degradation. The blades are all dual processor with 8 GB ram and connected to a fibre channel SAN or a fibre connected SAN using an SATA array.

Once a VM is tuned properly we have seen excellent performance. I originally configured the Zimbra test server with 512 MB of RAM and noticed some performance issues so I increased it to 1024 MB (easy to do with a VM) and it made all the difference. VMWare is an excellent tool for testing new scearios and software with adversly affect an existing set up as well.

[Bleve]

I intend to test zimba in a xen environment (domain 0 - netbsd, domain 1 whatever necessary - probably rhel 4 with a xen-aware kernel, unless by the time I get this setup zimbra works on *BSD )

[bhwong]

Hi Kevin,

VMplayer is indeed to slow to be usable, however, with ESX and ESXi, this is no longer an issue. It will ease our deployment time and effort if Zimbra is willing to create a VM with Linux and Zimbra installed for us to download. During first time, the configuration page will be shown for us to amend accordingly to our network and domain settings. This idiot-proof will lower the barrier and open doors for non-technical users to deploy Zimbra, which will be good for Zimbra. Please reconsider.

Thanks,
Boon Hong.