Zimbra requirements?

[mrdini]

Hi,

Lately, I've been looking at Zimbra with interest, as we are wishing to move away from an ageing qmail/courier/vpopmail installation.

However, there is one thing that keeps nagging at me - Zimbra's hardware requirements. Whilst not "crazy", they do seem mildly high for what essentially is a mail server. While I understand it's a bit unreasonable to use this as an comparision, I'd like to note that that mail toaster setup is running a few thousand email addresses off PIIIs.

Zimbra also uses similar-ishy software - postfix, mysql, apache etc, and if I'm not mistaken, at the end of the day, all "Zimbra" is is an unified solution that ties together the various OSS applications, and adds a very polished webmail and admin interface.

Please don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to troll or anything, just a bit perplexed by the apparently high requirements that Zimbra requires, given what it does.

For what it's worth, the hardware we're looking to run this on is a Xen-ified AMD Opteron 170 2GHz with 2GB RAM (we will probably beef up the RAM if we decide to go with Zimbra). This is running RHEL4, with CentOS VMs. We have around 20-30 mail users.

Many thanks for any input you may have on this...

In addition, if we were to decide to transition to the paid Network Edition, am I right in thinking this would not be supported as long as Zimbra was running in a CentOS VM? i.e. only a full-on RHEL VM would be supported?

TIA!

[JGJones]

I work for a charity, so the emphasis is on cheap hardware (in other words...not beefy systems) - however Zimbra provide an excellent chance for the charity to benefit from a great email platform at no cost, but the hardware requirements is a bit...."ouch" for a charity where every penny counts.

It'll certainly help me explain it to the folks with the money bags

[AimanA]

I am running this on a Xen SuSE P4 3GHz system that only has a Gig of ram allocated to it (the physical system has 4) and it shares CPU time with a couple of other web servers, and an upcoming Funambol server. I haven't seen a single slowdown, and I ran a load test against it from a workstation that can blaze out as many emails as the wire can carry.

I guess if you are doing capacity planning use the recommended specs, but I'm running just above the minimums and its smoking fast.

[Nox]

We are running the Community version 5.0.7 FOSS on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, using Dual 800 MHz P3 Xeon Processors with 4GB of RAM serving up 25 users and processing ~5,000 emails per day (most of them spam) and it seems to run fine for us. We even have all of those users running the Ajax client over a T1 point to point VPN WAN link.

Except for BIND9 to overcome the NAT for local mail delivery, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is the only thing running on the box.

[bonoboslr]

We are running 5.0.9NE on xen RHEL5 with no issues. We decided not to run zimbra-ldap on XEN as there have been issues previously and partly to do with performance optimization. We have 450,000 users so obviously we need to have a multi server setup.