Zimbra Forums

I track our downloads of Zimbra to track things like platform usage. I've steadily seen a decline in SLES downloads to the point where SLES is about 3% of downloads for any given maintenance release. So curious...
Who is still running Zimbra on SLES?

Who has left SLES and why?

We are. We used to have licenses through being a novell customer but now we have licenses through VMWare as part of our vSphere lcienses.

WE USED TO RUN ALL OF OUR LINUX BOXES ON SLES BUT ARE MIGRATING TO UBUNTU. THE REASONS ARE:



NOVELL INCREASED THE PRICES OF OUR SLES LICENSING BY A MULTIPLE OF THREE.

XENSERVER 6.0.2 DOES NOT NOT SUPPORT SLES 11 SP 2.

NOVELL NO LONGER ADHERES TO KEEPING THINGS STABLE THROUGHOUT A SLES LIFECYCLE; THE WHOLE GLIBC NONSENSE WITH SP1 THAT DRAMATICALLY IMPACTED OUR MANAGEMENT OF ZIMBRA UPGRADES WAS NOT SOMETHING WE WANT TO GO THROUGH AGAIN.

ATTACHMATE SEEMS NOT TO HAVE A CLEAR VISION FOR SLES'S POSITIONING AMONG OTHER LINUX DISTROS.

IT USED TO BE THAT IBM WOULD RECOMMEND RHEL FOR BASIC X86 DEPLOYMENTS, BUT FOR "SERIOUS" LINUX DEPLOYMENTS (E.G. ON Z90), SLES WAS THE DISTRO OF CHOICE. NO LONGER.

JEOS SHOWED A LOT OF PROMISE BUT IT IS NOT AS SIMPLE AS AN UBUNTU SERVER INSTALL WITH NOTHING BUT SSHD SELECTED IN THE PACKAGE DIALOG BOX ON INSTALL. SLES STILL REQUIRES THAT YOU INSTALL POSTFIX, WHICH WE THEN HAVE TO DISABLE TO DO A ZIMBRA INSTALL.


THERE IS NOTHING, NOTHING LIKE YAST IN ANY OTHER LINUX DISTRO, AND YAST SAVES US SO MUCH ADMINISTRATION TIME THAT WE WOULD HAVE WILLINGLY PAID THE HIGHER LICENSING COSTS HAD THE OTHER REASONS NOT BEEN EXISTENT. WITH YAST I CAN LIGHT UP A CHROOTED BIND9 DNS SERVER WITH CLEAN CONFIGS, REVERSE ZONES, SECURE REPLICATION AND ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES IN UNDER 10 MINUTES.
BASICALLY, WE THINK SLES IS THE BETAMAX OF THE VIDEOTAPE INDUSTRY. TECHNICALLY MUCH SUPERIOR BUT INCREASINGLY MARGINALIZED, AND THE TAPES AREN'T LONG ENOUGH TO RECORD A WHOLE FOOTBALL GAME. BIG BUMMER. SO WE ARE MOVING ON.
IF ZIMBRA DEPRECATED SLES IN 8.1 AND DROPPED IT IN 8.2 (IF THAT'S THE NUMBERING SCHEME...) WE WOULD NOT COMPLAIN.
HAVING SAID THAT, WE ARE PROBABLY MORE NIMBLE THAN MANY SLES SHOPS, SO I'D BE CAREFUL ABOUT DEPRECATING TOO QUICKLY. A NUMBER OF THE SLES ZIMBRA DEPLOYMENTS WE'VE SEEN ARE FAIRLY LARGE; ONE ZIMBRA NE DOWNLOAD FOR SLES GETS INSTALLED ON MANY ZIMBRA SERVERS, SO I'D TAKE THAT DOWNLOAD PERCENTAGE FIGURE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT.
HOPE THAT HELPS,

MARK

Hi,
[quote]I track our downloads of Zimbra to track things like platform usage. I've steadily seen a decline in SLES downloads to the point where SLES is about 3% of downloads for any given maintenance release. So curious...
Who is still running Zimbra on SLES?

Who has left SLES and why?[/QUOTE]
We are using Zimbra on top of SLES on hundreds customer (most of them are Zimbra OSE, both on physical or virtualization, both using SLES from ISO DVD or using SLES for VMWare). Statistics from Zimbra download page may mislead because we have some local mirror for Zimbra binary here in Indonesia. Most of our customer and our local Zimbra community download from local mirror instead of downloading it from Zimbra download page.
Also, as mentioned by LM Stone, [QUOTE]one Zimbra NE download for SLES gets installed on many Zimbra servers, so I'd take that download percentage figure with a grain of salt[/QUOTE]
On deployment, I've create custom appliances based on SLES 11 SP1 and SP2 and make it as template on vSphere :
Installing Zimbra Mail Server on SLES 11 SP1 64 bit in less than 30 Minutes-Part 3 | Spirit of Change

Excellent Appliance for VMware – SUSE Gallery
From SLES perspective, it seems that Attachmate doesn't really focus on expanding SUSE (SLE) business-especially for promo and campaign-compared to what Red Hat doing on their business. From the quality perspective, I would love recommend SLES for Zimbra deployment.

i've been hoping vmware would buy suse for a while now.

I'm guessing most clients only download once and install many, so I don't see that the 3% is particularly misrepresented against other OSes?