Real world Exchange 2003 + BES Migration

[darmstrongmoca]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently in the early phases of planning a Zimbra test environment. I want to get some heads up about what I am really in for before I get started. My current email environment consists of 3 Exchange 2003 servers (1 front-end, 2 back-end) and a Blackberry Enterprise Server (4.1) hosting about 40 devices.

My users make extensive use of shared calendars, and send-as functionality in Outlook. I have some questions about permissions migration to Zimbra. Does the Zimbra migration tool, or the PST import method preserve the permissions or do they need to be manually recreated?

What is the preferred method for synchronizing account creation/deletion activities between Active Directory and Zimbra?

Has anyone out there done a successful Zimbra implemention using BES? How does it work? What does RIM think of Zimbra using the Exchange connector? Do they support it when problems arise?

I'm under the impression that Zimbra is written in Java and because of that is a rather hardware intensive application. I'm currently hosting 150 Exchange users on an HP Proliant ML350 (P3 Xeon processor at 3ghz with 4GB of RAM). What are some real world hardware specs for hosting 150 Zimbra users?

How does the Zimbra disaster recovery model work? I'm currently using Backup Exec with their Exchange agent and it works great. It gives me individual mailbox backups so that I can restore a single message into one user's mailbox if necessary. Does Zimbra offer that functionality, or do I have to restore the entire mailstore?

Has anyone had to do a bare metal restore on a Zimbra server? What was that like?

[rdronov]

Hi!

I think all these questions are for developers. I also couldn't find any particular hardware tests. This would be great if Zimbra team makes such tests and put results on this site.