Why is Zimbra so buggy?

[carr]

Originally Posted by edwin.arneson

Since they need to complete with desktop clients like Thunderbird and Outlook, there are features that are missing and should be included.

Sorry but a naked Thinderbird client does not have that many features. But people are contributing throughout plugins, because there is DOCUMENTATION. Zimlets are supposed to be the plugins for Zimbra, but no one wants to put up with such a mess.

[nrc]

Originally Posted by carr

Sorry but a naked Thinderbird client does not have that many features. But people are contributing throughout plugins, because there is DOCUMENTATION. Zimlets are supposed to be the plugins for Zimbra, but no one wants to put up with such a mess.

I agree, if Zimbra hopes to have any substantial community support they need to clean up their API documentation.

However, I don't think that they can afford to rest on features. They're still missing too many features that users expect in an Enterprise messaging system to rest on features.

If we're talking about focus of effort, I'd have to say that the desktop version is probably the effort that could best be sacrificed for a greater focus on documentation, clean-up, and bug fixes.

[carr]

Originally Posted by nrc

If we're talking about focus of effort, I'd have to say that the desktop version is probably the effort that could best be sacrificed for a greater focus on documentation, clean-up, and bug fixes.

I'm not sure though, but I think the desktop version is not such an effort. It is basically a trimmed Zimbra server using Mozilla Prism.

However, I agree with you on focusing on documentation, clean-up and bug fixes.

@jholder:
When compared to Norton Virus you are in the "bloated not so good working" phase.
I'm sorry to say this, but at the moment you are not such a "good" company, because it takes more to be one then just being there.
I agree with you though that it is normal to make mistakes, but it also depends on the kind of mistakes and the way you handle them.

Since I started using Zimbra, I never had the feeling that you are really talking to your community. Take a look at this thread. Your are the only one participating.
We don't want to hear that you are great company. We want to see results =)

[gweldon]

I made the mistake of choosing Zimbra for my mail server offering. The product was the buggiest crap I have ever worked with, I received critical bug fix notifications one and a half years after it destroyed my business. If anyone tries to sell you on Zimbra I can only say one thing: "RUN!!! RUN LIKE HELL!!!"

To think they are offering this bloatware as a Virtual machine is a bad joke. Anyone who knows anything about virtual machines knows that they are no good for heavy disk I/O. Everyone knows this except Zimbra I guess.....

[bdial]

There isn't much that can't be virtualized these days with the right hardware. People are virtualizing exchange, sql server, and other high i/o apps all the time now.

[uxbod]

Originally Posted by gweldon

I made the mistake of choosing Zimbra for my mail server offering. The product was the buggiest crap I have ever worked with, I received critical bug fix notifications one and a half years after it destroyed my business. If anyone tries to sell you on Zimbra I can only say one thing: "RUN!!! RUN LIKE HELL!!!"

To think they are offering this bloatware as a Virtual machine is a bad joke. Anyone who knows anything about virtual machines knows that they are no good for heavy disk I/O. Everyone knows this except Zimbra I guess.....

Perhaps you could substantiate what you are saying by the type of issues you encountered ?

[fcash]

Originally Posted by gweldon

To think they are offering this bloatware as a Virtual machine is a bad joke. Anyone who knows anything about virtual machines knows that they are no good for heavy disk I/O. Everyone knows this except Zimbra I guess.....

We run Zimbra NE 5.x in a KVM-based virtual machine, and it's running perfectly for 2100 accounts, all connecting via the web interface (with just about every account logging in at 8am, and a couple of hundred being online concurrently throughout the day). Along with about 100 Blackberry devices connecting via BES (which also runs in a KVM-based VM on the same host). And a couple of hundred ActiveSync clients. And an unknown number of IMAP clients.

VMs have come a long way. With virtualised drivers for network and disk I/O paths, they're really not much slower than physical I/O paths. All it takes is a little time to benchmark, tune, and test.

And we don't even have that skookum of VM host hardware (several years old):

• 5U Chenbro case with 24 drive bays attached to a hot-swappable SATA backplane
• 1350W 4-way redundant PSU
• Tyan h2000M motherboard (S3992-E)
• 2x AMD Opteron 2220 CPUs @ 2.8 GHz (dual-core)
• 32 GB ECC DDR2-SDRAM
• 2x 3Ware 9650SE 12-port SATA-II RAID controller plugged into a PCIe slot
• 12x 400 GB WD SATA harddrives (RAID60 for bulk storage)
• 12x 500 GB WD SATA harddrives (RAID10 for fast storage)
• Intel PRO/1000MT 4-port gigabit NIC (PCIe)
• Tyan System Management Daughter Card (M3291) for remote management via IPMI

Not to mention, the best, easiest, fastest way to test something is to throw it into a VM. If it works, then you can consider leaving it in a VM or moving it to a physical machine. If it doesn't work, then you just trash the VM. No need to "waste" a physical host during the testing.

I'm sorry to hear you didn't have a good experience with Zimbra, and that you don't like VMs. But there's no need to trash things you don't like. There are lots of us running Zimbra without any issues ... even in VMs.