Confused about "public service host name" and proxy

[mhlevy]

Hi All,
I guess I'm just confused about the interaction and implications of setting a "public service host name" on a domain, and using a Zimbra proxy for the domain. I've read both the "Set Up HTTP Proxy as a Separate Proxy Node" section of the Admin guide AND the famous Thread: [SOLVED] "Public service host name" in domain creation http://www.zimbra.com/forums/administra ... ation.html) thread, and I'm still confused...
In this example, we've got 2 mailbox servers, mailbox1.domain.com and mailbox2.domain.com, and a zimbra proxy server, proxy.domain.com.
Each of the above servers has an A record set up in DNS with their IP address. I'm hoping to set up a single DNS entry for all users in the domain (no matter what mailbox server their mailbox actually resides upon), so an additional A record has been set up for webmail.domain.com, which will have the same IP address as the proxy server (the reason for the A record rather than CNAME, is because the mailbox mode is set to redirect, and https redirection doesn't play well with CNAME records)
We actually host multiple domains on the mailbox server, but we've never implemented virtual hosts, and all of our users have been trained to use their smtp address as their "login name" so vitrual hosts shouldn't complicate what I'm trying to do.
My confusion is do I also set the domain's "public service host name" to "webmail.domain.com, the same "name" as the proxy server? This kind-of-sort-of makes sense, since as I understand it, the PSHN for a domain sets up a "virtual host name" for all the mailbox servers in the domain (sort of like a "pseudo-node" in a cluster environment) for access, so wouldn't I want to set this to the same name as the proxy?
Or am I just completely wrong? Sorry if I seem dense, but I"m moving from a single mailbox server environment to multi-mailbox server environment, and adding a proxy (and I think the PSHN) should make a mailbox server migration go more smoothly (I hope).
Thanks in advance,
Mark

[chauvetp]

Hi Mark,
We went through (still not 100% finished) a single server to multi-server migration. It appears that you have it correct as you describe it. Just to clarify and use what we did as an example:




We had a single server (zimbra.domain.com) which is what users always went to (for IMAP, SMTP, webmail, etc.)

We setup three mailstores (zstore1.domain.com, zstore2.domain.com, zstore3.domain.com)

We setup that single server as a proxy as well (so when I started moving accounts to different mailstores, each user could still use the original server URL (zimbra.domain.com) with no issues.

We then setup two proxy servers (zproxy1.domain.com, zproxy2.domain.com).

We set the public service hostname for each server as zimbra.domain.com

We pointed DNS (round-robin) for zimbra.domain.com at the two proxy servers.


By using the zimbraPublicServiceHostname, we made sure that even if users were going to one of the proxy servers, the URL in the address bar remained zimbra.domain.com.