Zimbra Performance and Architecture question

[umoorjani]

Hey,

I wanna sell zimbra open source (to start with) to my company for our managed hosted mail server service for clients, so it's typical multi-domain. Now I want to scale our server for +20,000 mailboxes. What low-cost, good performance architecture (no san, we can't afford it for this service) will be good for +20,000 mailboxes? Anyone has experiences with this ?

Sincerely,

CookieMonster

[y@w]

Zimbra is rough on IO. We're running about 450 mailboxes on a RAID 10 with SATA drives and are struggling a bit. Careful when you say "low-cost" and 20,000 mailboxes in the same sentence. My two cents: avoid SATA, just like the wiki says. Also: lots and lots of RAM.

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Large Deployments - Zimbra :: Wiki

[JetteroHeller]

Thanks for the wiki link. I was searching all over the forums, but that answers just about everything. Except for the virtualization performance question, which I am still trying to resolve. I.e. I do want to be able to take a nice, beefy box and load more than one Zimbra SERVER onto it, for the purposes of independent administration. Now just trying to resolve the best container to put that in. I dislike Xen, and have had good experience with Qemu, but no data on others' experience.