Hardware Specs, Zimbra Features

[Markus23]

Hi!

My Company is currently evaluating Zimbra to replace our old outdated email-solution.

But there are still some hardware / software related questions, which needed to be answered before any decision is made.

1. Hardware Specs

Currently we think about the following hardware components to buy:

Xeon 2Ghz Dualcore
4 GB Memory
Two 80GB SATA HDs (Raid-1) for OS (CentOS 5.x)
Four 143GB SAS HDs (Raid-10) for email-database (zimbra)

Is this Hardware suitable for about 100 Email-Users via the Zimbra (Ajax) Webinterface ?


2. Software / Zimbra Specs

Is it possible to get the following features with Zimbra:

- use Zimbra as Intranet-Email-Server
- Zimbra should contact our external email-provider, which stores all our emails in a Multi-Pop Account, then distributes the emails to our local email-users (some kind of relay ?)
- use our AntiVir/Avira email solution, we already bought
- possibility to limit some of the email-users only to intranet-email rights (no external email!)



Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help.



Bye,

Markus

[phoenix]

Welcome to the forums.

That hardware specification would be more than adequate. Is this for the Network Edition or Open Source edition? If it's for NE then we do not provide support for CentOS, it would have to be RHEL. For the OSS version CentOS is fine.

For the A/S-A/V it would depend what your current soluton doe and how it's implemented. If it processes the mail and forwards it to Zimbra then that would work, you could disable (if you wanted) our A/S-A/V.

I'm not sure about the multi-drop pop mail collection. Is there any reason you don't want the mail delivered directly to your server?

yes, you can use zimbra internally and you can limit the sending of external email for some users. Some f these would be via postfix modifications.

How is your system set-up at the moment?

[Markus23]

Originally Posted by phoenix

That hardware specification would be more than adequate. Is this for the Network Edition or Open Source edition? If it's for NE then we do not provide support for CentOS, it would have to be RHEL. For the OSS version CentOS is fine.

We thought about using the OSS Version.

For the A/S-A/V it would depend what your current soluton doe and how it's implemented. If it processes the mail and forwards it to Zimbra then that would work, you could disable (if you wanted) our A/S-A/V.

Isn't it possible to integrate commerical Antivirus-Solutions via AMAvis, or does Zimbra only support the ClamAV/Spamassassin Bundle via Amavis ?
Maybe we could insert our email a/v (avira) into the system ?

I'm not sure about the multi-drop pop mail collection. Is there any reason you don't want the mail delivered directly to your server?

At the moment we only got one ADSL Connection (192kbit upstream , 3Mbit downstream) for email and web. It seems a good solution to use this external Multidrop-pop in case of Bandwidth Limits, Security Reasons (any attacks / hacking the mailserver). Till now the only external mailaccess is via this multidrop-pop Account from our provider (who has of course these mentioned problems solved). This Provider also hosts our Domain and our little web presence.

Or do you think it would be a good idea to install a complete Mailserver with complete external access, or even host our web presence on our own ?
But keep in mind we only got this ADSL-Line and very little experiences in offering those external services to the whole internet (in case of security!).

yes, you can use zimbra internally and you can limit the sending of external email for some users. Some f these would be via postfix modifications.

How is your system set-up at the moment?

Our setup consists of an old Collax Server (Collax) which is mainly used for emails (via this external Multidrop-Pop Account) and for managing our internet connection.


Bye,

Markus

[phoenix]

For the OSS version installing Zimbra on CentOS would be fine, many of us here use that operating system.

The usual scenario for an A/S-A/V solution for it to process the email externally to zimbra nd forward it to us, either port 25 or via LMTP would do.

Rather that trying to implement mail collection from the multi-drop mailbox I'd suggest that just opening port 25 (plus any ports for client access) in your Firewall or Router would be adequate and getting direct mail delivery is far better. I used to run an Exchange server on a 1Mb connection without any problems. Hosting a web presence on that connection might be problematic depending on how busy your site is.

[Markus23]

Originally Posted by phoenix

The usual scenario for an A/S-A/V solution for it to process the email externally to zimbra nd forward it to us, either port 25 or via LMTP would do.

Hmm, then i have to check our avira solution again, maybe they already got some kind of tutorial for using it that way.

Rather that trying to implement mail collection from the multi-drop mailbox I'd suggest that just opening port 25 (plus any ports for client access) in your Firewall or Router would be adequate and getting direct mail delivery is far better. I used to run an Exchange server on a 1Mb connection without any problems. Hosting a web presence on that connection might be problematic depending on how busy your site is.

But keep in mind that we haven't got a static ip nor any DNS running.
So we need to implement this also, if we want to run our own internal/external email server (Static IP isn't a big problem, DNS maybe ;-) )


Bye,

Markus

[phoenix]

DNS, especially on RHEL/CentOS, is extremely simple to set-up internally.

[Markus23]

Ok, i will try to get it working and to convince my boss & Management to choose this solution ..

thanks so far , but i think more zimbra specific questions will follow ;-)


Bye,

Markus