Top 10 Reasons to Virtualize

VMware Zimbra Collaboration

Server with VMware vSphere
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 Top 10 Reasons to Virtualize VMware Zimbra
Collaboration Server with VMware vSphere

Email outages disrupt a company’s ability to conduct business. Issues as diverse as scheduled downtime, human
errors and unexpected failures make high email service levels difficult to achieve at a reasonable cost. Ensuring
recovery from a serious outage is equally difficult. These combined challenges grow as email volumes grow,
causing organizations to look for a better approach to email management.
The solution—as demonstrated by recent benchmarking testing of VMware® Zimbra® Collaboration Server™ on
VMware vSphere®—begins with virtualization of email applications with vSphere. Virtualizing Zimbra Collaboration
Server with vSphere can deliver the flexibility and performance needed to ensure high service levels, increase
operational efficiency and flexibility, and control costs. In addition, vSphere provides a more efficient platform for
business-continuity and disaster-recovery capabilities that reduce planned and unplanned downtime.
Any platform for hosting a Zimbra Collaboration Server environment must be reliable and proven. VMware is the
industry leader in virtualization. With more than 10 years of industry experience, vSphere is the only virtualization
platform that has the maturity, stability, performance and features required for hosting your critical Zimbra
Collaboration Server infrastructure now and in the long term. Of the many great reasons to virtualize Zimbra
Collaboration Server with vSphere, here are 10 of the most important.

1. Performance: Zimbra Performance on vSphere Beats Exchange

Current testing of a sample workload that compares Zimbra Collaboration Server to Microsoft Exchange 2010
shows substantial performance improvements over Exchange 2010 inside a VMware virtual machine. With
today’s powerful 64-bit quad-core processors—and soon-to-come octa-core processors—you gain all the
financial and operational benefits of virtualization without degrading performance or the user experience.

2. Reliability: Protect Every Server with vSphere High Availability

vSphere provides simple, out-of-the-box high availability for all Zimbra servers. If a server fails, vSphere High
Availability (VMware HA) can automatically restart all virtual machines on another VMware enabled server.
VMware HA gives you high availability—independent of the operating system (OS) or applications—for every
server running in a virtual machine, including tier-1 email servers.

3. Flexibility: Avoid Overprovisioning of Valuable CPU and RAM Resources

Designing and deploying an email-messaging solution all too often involves choosing the right combination of
hardware and storage—and then hoping that it will last for several years without requiring major upgrades. But
the reality is that as users’ needs evolve, so must the systems that provide email and collaboration services to
them. Virtualization removes the need to duplicate hardware, because virtual machines’ CPU, network, storage
and RAM resources can be increased to meet an organization’s needs. A virtualized email-messaging environment
can help your organization avoid costly overprovisioning of valuable CPU and RAM resources.
With a virtualized Zimbra Collaboration Server environment, you can avoid costly overprovisioning and gain
the flexibility you need to keep pace with changing user and business needs in a cost-effective way.

4. Recovery: Count on Simplified Out-of-the-Box Disaster Recovery

Virtual machines can run on any VMware enabled server. This eliminates driver and hardware compatibility issues
between primary and recovery sites—and simplifies recovery of Zimbra Collaboration Server servers after a
disaster. In a virtualized environment, IT staff can plan and practice for recovery offline. VMware tools can
help make your disaster-recovery plans repeatable and automated.
Virtualizing Zimbra Collaboration Server makes disaster recovery easier, less costly and more reliable.

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 Top 10 Reasons to Virtualize VMware Zimbra
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5. Intelligent Load Balancing: Get Power When and Where You Need It
Zimbra Collaboration Server is a variable load. If a physical mailbox server is sized for peak loading, the server wastes
costly resource capacity at nonpeak times. Automated load balancing with the power of vSphere vMotion® gives you
the solution. vMotion enables you to move virtual machines from one server to another without interruption. You can
reduce planned downtime and perform maintenance on the host any time, without disrupting end users.
vMotion works in concert with vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (VMware DRS), which collects resource-
usage information and generates recommendations for virtual-machine placement. The result is dynamic and
intelligent load balancing, with VMware DRS placing your tier-1 mailbox servers where the required resources are.
VMware ESX® servers can share capacity and include fairness and scheduling capabilities that guarantee that
your Zimbra Collaboration Server servers receive the resources they require for peak operation.

6. Modularity: You Don’t Need to Typecast Your Servers

With Zimbra Collaboration Server, you’re designing for multiple server roles. Virtualization enables each role to
be deployed as a distinct virtual machine. Because they can all run on one server—or spread across multiple
systems—you reduce costs and lower the risk of outages.
For customers who want to streamline setup and configuration, Zimbra offers the Zimbra Collaboration
Server Appliance (Zimbra Appliance). By deploying Zimbra Appliance on vSphere in configurations of up to
1,000 users, you can provide a complete, fully configured and operational messaging and collaboration
solution in about 10 minutes or less—and simplify administration and maintenance operations.
As conditions change, you can move any virtual machines without interrupting the end-user experience. Your
design is totally adaptable. Zimbra Appliance is fully integrated with vSphere, so no additional configuration
and management is required.

7. Efficiency: Get Your Money’s Worth from 64-Bit Hardware

Going forward, Zimbra requires 64-bit servers. Combined with maximum processors and memory, that represents
huge processing capacity. vSphere enables you to use that capacity. Running multiple virtual machines on powerful
systems is a proven way to reduce hardware, power, cooling and operational-overhead costs dramatically. When
deploying Zimbra Appliance, you can use your existing vSphere infrastructure as well as all storage protocols
supported by vSphere to include Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS (which other messaging platforms do not support).
You can consolidate Zimbra Collaboration Server servers with other compatible workloads and save
significant costs by leveraging your existing vSphere infrastructure.

8. Better Testing and Development: Easily Maintain an Offline Duplicate of Zimbra

Collaboration Server
With physical machines, maintaining a complete, isolated duplicate of a production environment is expensive
and difficult. Ensuring that the offline environment patch levels and OS version are compatible with the production
environment can be difficult. With vSphere, you can replicate a virtual Zimbra Collaboration Server infrastructure to
an isolated virtual environment, reducing complexity and saving time.
Test your design with a real off-network model before going live. Test patches or other changes exactly as
they’ll be deployed. Maintain simulated systems to test disaster recovery.

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 Top 10 Reasons to Virtualize VMware Zimbra
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9. Simplicity: Take Advantage of Templates, Snapshots and Clones

vSphere includes powerful tools for working with virtual machines. Templates enable you to keep an inventory of all
server images and deploy a new virtual-machine OS in minutes. This can save countless hours when you need to
deploy a new system. Virtual-machine snapshots and clones are great tools for testing and troubleshooting. Live
snapshots of vSphere virtual machines can be made any time. By using a cloned virtual machine in an isolated test
environment, email administrators and developers can use an exact copy of the production environment to fix bugs,
test migration scenarios or even provide administrative training—without affecting users.
It takes just minutes to install ESX or ESXi— the underlying virtualization layer of vSphere—on physical
hardware to unlock all of the benefits of virtualization.

10. Smooth Transition: Maintain Legacy Email Systems for Coexistence with Zimbra
Collaboration Server
Many organizations need to maintain Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 systems while designing and planning a
migration to Zimbra Collaboration Server. Virtual machines are ideal for maintaining a legacy Exchange server.
By using the VMware vCenter™ Converter™ tool to convert the system from physical to virtual, you can make the
transition with minimal effort.

Meet the Challenges of Email Management Today

Pick your reason. Organizations of all kinds and sizes are using Zimbra Collaboration Server on VMware vSphere
to meet the challenges of email management, including greater flexibility and business agility, more-efficient
disaster recovery, and lower costs.

Find Out More

To learn more about how VMware can help reduce the cost and complexity of email solutions,
call 1-877-4-VMWARE (outside North America, +1-650-427-5000) or visit http://www.vmware.com.

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