Use 5 physical server run Open Source Mail Server

[wonglihaung123]

Hello,

My company are looking for open source mail server deploy on 5 physical server about 1000 users. I find Zimbra to able to use clustering.

What price we will paid ? Will you help to deploy servers if we have any problems?

[zimico]

Hello,

My company are looking for open source mail server deploy on 5 physical server about 1000 users. I find Zimbra to able to use clustering.

What price we will paid ? Will you help to deploy servers if we have any problems?

I think currently Zimbra does not provide true "clustering". Zimbra is multi server system. With OSE, you have multi/clustering LDAP server only.

Best regards,
Minh.

[L. Mark Stone]

Zimbra Hosting Partners (“BSP”) contracts prevent them from providing paid support to OSE customers, unless they have a Support agreement in place with Synacor.

Since 1k users will fit on one server, I would recommend using four physical servers like so:

2 LDAP MMR/MTA/Proxy servers
1 production mailbox server
1 disaster recovery mailbox server

Use your backup method of choice (OSE Zimbra ships with no built-in backup) on the production mailbox server and use the d/r server to rsync the backups over. You can then practice your restores.

Alternatively, get supported shared storage and use VMware (or any other supported hypervisor) to have the virtual servers be rebooted automatically in the event of a server hardware failure.

I had one customer who set up DRDB for a Zimbra cluster. He had LDAP corruption in the primary server, which was immediately copied over to the DRDB server right before the cluster failed over. The failover technically worked fine; Zimbra was still broken.

If you just need backups and no other Network Edition functionality, you can license that from Zextras, or, for a bit more money, you can get Network Edition, which includes a lot more, including Support form Zimbra. Zimbra’s Network Edition backup is the same Zextras backup (they have a cooperation deal)

Hope that helps,
Mark

[wonglihaung123]

Hello,

We hope to have 7x24 suuport and with more functions using network Edition. We have vmware environment and sufficient resource, but company decide to buy another 5 physical machine to deploy.

Now we are still searching some open source mail server to deploy, one of them is ZIMBRA. Another is postfix, which have more information on internet, I have no try it.

I try to deploy a single zimbra , it find not too complicated. However, if zimbra in multiple server, it show more complicated .From this link https://computingforgeeks.com/zimbra-mu ... -centos-7/

It show that need the following roles.

Install LDAP server(s) – Multi-Master Replication (MMR) or Replication
Install Zimbra Mailbox Server(s)
Install MTA Server(s)
Install Proxy Server(s)

If we have active directory , do we still need deploy LDAP servers ?

[ianw1974]

Postfix is just SMTP, to then try and make that work like Zimbra, you also need to install a web server, so nginx or apache and then use something like roundcube for webmail. Then you need dovecot for imap/pop3, and then integrate that with your LDAP/AD. So will be quite a bit of work to do it like this. I used to have a mail server like this, until I switched to Zimbra many years ago (started with Zimbra 5 or 6 and upgraded ever since).

With Zimbra, yes you can connect it to your AD/LDAP after it has been installed, and configure the domain accordingly to use external auth with LDAP/AD.

[L. Mark Stone]

To be 120% clear, yes, you do need Zimbra’s LDAP, always. It’s where most of Zimbra’s server, system and account configurations are stored—even when doing Active Directory authentication.

Other per-server configurations are stored in each server’s localconfig.xml file, and a few configurations are stored in *.conf.in files.

Good luck with your project!

Mark