Hi, Daniel ...
I've been meaning to respond, but have been covered up with higher priorities ;-).
There is no digit missing. We get 800-900 accounts per mailstore, and, toward the 900-end, we see performance issues. This is largely a result of historical scaling issues with the initial 32-bit Linux systems. We are in the middle of the transition to 64-bits.
Additionally, we have a disproportionate number of IMAP accounts, which we've been advised are more memory intensive. I read the thread on nio_imap_enabled with great interest, but Zimbra support indicates,
We were having, up until a few weeks ago, mailbox.log entries which Zimbra support clearly indicates were out of memory for the Java heap. Again, on 32-bits. A 4GB RAM maximum on the existing POs has been cramping our style.
We are also on VMware. There has been speculation that there are issues with this type of configuration, but nothing specific enough to have a substantial move away from this type of infrastructure.
How many accounts does the community see per mail store? With heavily-utilized IMAP accounts? I would presume most folks are on 64-bits ... and not having the same 32-bit trouble we had.
As for our upgrade bug, specifically, we were concerned about seeing duplicate contacts and high load, now fixed, per Zimbra support, back in November:
This is not a VMware-specific bug, but it kept up from upgrading.
Have you seen the duplicates bug in 6.0.3? It is not likely we will go to 6.0.3 at this point since 6.0.5 is out, but I am curious. I'm still asking Zimbra support about any specific upgrade issues within VMware as well. I'll be happy to share when I learn more.
A. Daniel King, IT System Support Professional V
Kennesaw State University
1000 Chastain Road, Mailstop 3503
Kennesaw, GA 30101
770-423-6902 (Office)
678-634-4917 (Mobile)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@drake.edu>
To: zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 4:29:47 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: Large Zimbra deployments on VM
On 2010-02-23 at 13:48:56, A. Daniel King wrote:
> 3300+ accounts
> RAM sizing: Don't do less than 16GB on a mail store.
> Five or six mail stores seems to be sufficient for our environment,
> ~800-900 accounts per VM
I was surprised to see those points together. I definitely agree on the
16 GB (or more--we use 24 GB) per mail store. But running 5 or 6
mailstores just for 3,300 accounts? Is a digit missing from the number
of accounts?
>I've had several tickets open with Zimbra support regarding upgrading
>to Zimbra v6 from our 5.0.19NE, and we've not yet received a clear
>recommendation
I'm also curious about what sort of issues you expect; maybe someone in
this group can offer advice. We upgraded from 5.0.16 to 6.0.3 a few
months ago and it went well. Usually for upgrades we keep the system
running as much as possible during the upgrade, but for that one we took
the entire Zimbra cluster offline. It ended up going fairly quickly.
--
Daniel A. Ramaley
Network Engineer 2
Dial Center 118, Drake University
2407 Carpenter Ave / Des Moines IA 50311 USA
Tel: +1 515 271-4540
Fax: +1 515 271-1938
E-mail: daniel.ramaley@drake.edu