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Is anybody using vmware FT for Zimbra servers?

Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:47 am
by tvtsg
I am tasked with building a Zimbra NE hosting platform and would like to have as much HA and DR features as possible. All of the servers will be VMs in a vShere ESXi 4.1 cluster. I was wondering if anyone has had any success with VM Fault Tolerance on Zimbra VMs. I am concerned with Zimbra's CPU requirements and also the ability of the FT secondary to remain in sync.
I have been working with ESX for a few years and am comfortable with HA/DRS, etc. I have not yet had the opportunity to implement FT and see that this may be a good fit. Any gotchas to look for? Recommendations? I do have dedicated 1G NIC configured for FT, separate from the vkernel network for vMotion, etc.
I will be starting off small, less than 100 mailboxes, but see a possibility of this quickly expanding to several thousands.
Any and all comments, suggestions, flames welcome.
Thanks,

Bryan

TVTSG

Is anybody using vmware FT for Zimbra servers?

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 10:31 am
by tvtsg
Here is the answer I received from a sales engineer at Zimbra. Pretty much what I expected...
"I don't know of any customers using vSphere FT. The single CPU limititation is a big issue, Zimbra servers are recommended to have 2, 4, or even 8 vCPUs depending on server type. In addition, our multi-tier architecture means that the only server type that isn't HA is the mailbox server, and that can be failed over to different hardware using vMotion within a fairly short period of time (short enough that most users will not notice.) So FT may be something to look at in the future as hardware and network get faster and the feature matures, but right now I don't think it's a good fit for a Zimbra server."