Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Running our Appliance (ZCA), ZCS on VMware, or any other virtual machine software? Post your thoughts here.
1415bhwong
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by 1415bhwong »

Hi Cwindomsr, I took the performance metrics from our vCenter. Just that it wasn't clear if it is in relationship with it's VM resources or the host resources.
chinenye
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by chinenye »

When configuring Zimbra mail box server with a shared storage accessible to both server, hosted on vmware esx 4.0, how do I make the shared storage for mail box accessible to both mailbox server synchronously. VMware advised I inquire from Zimbra on how to configure clustered mail box in zimbra, the shared storage has been created and assigned to the 2 mail box servers from VMware, but what is written by one is not seen by the 2nd server till after reboot.
Please assist
Thanks
phoenix
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by phoenix »

You should uupdate your forum profile with the output of the following command (do not post the output in this thread):
zmcontrol -v
[quote user="chinenye"]When configuring Zimbra mail box server with a shared storage accessible to both server, hosted on vmware esx 4.0, how do I make the shared storage for mail box accessible to both mailbox server synchronously. [/QUOTE]What exactly are you trying to achieve here? What is your exact configuration of Zimbra?
Regards

Bill

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chinenye
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by chinenye »

The Zimbra mail box server has not been installed yet, we have just set up the Operating System for the mail box server which is CentOS 6.0 and added the shared storage to them, and wish to check the feature of shared storage synchronising before actually deploying the mail box Zimbra
phoenix
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by phoenix »

chinenye wrote:The Zimbra mail box server has not been installed yet, we have just set up the Operating System for the mail box server which is CentOS 6.0 and added the shared storage to them, and wish to check the feature of shared storage synchronising before actually deploying the mail box Zimbra
I'll ask the question again, slightly differently this time. ;)
What is your intended configuration and what are you trying to achieve with that configuration?
Regards

Bill

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chinenye
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by chinenye »

we intend to have 2 mailbox servers
50gb hdd each running CentOS 6.0 and the 2 will have access to a shared vmware vmdk partition of 100g for a start, and the mail boxes are meant to read and write on the 100g shared volume synchronously, just like an nfs share.
Thanks
grob115
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Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by grob115 »

cwindomsr wrote:When virtualizing, this really all depends on the hardware layout (NUMA nodes)
If the hardware is a 12 core (2x6) then the largest virtual machines would consume a single NUMA node of 6 cores and 24GB of system memory. This would prevent NUMA cross-talk.
In the case of today's more powerful processors, I generally recommend starting with 2 vCPUs and increasing vCPUS if the load is running hot (60 - 70%) during peak times. If the SAN is configured properly, we have seen through testing the ability to get about 8000 users on a 4vCPU/32GB virtual machine running at about 42% user and about 7% sys utilization with a SendMsg latency of about 203ms which is well under the 1000ms max for a good enduser experience.



Hope This Helps,

cwindomsr
Sorry was that 8000 users figure a simultaneous activity with all 8000 users logged in? Or you are referring to a Zimbra deployment with 8000 accounts?
Lineikosen
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Re: Recommendations for Virtualizing Zimbra with VMware vSphere 4

Post by Lineikosen »

Thanks , Follow the appropriate monitoring and data-gathering procedures for determining your organization's messaging requirements, I will keep that information for future reference
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