Building Zimbra on CentOS 7 on CloudatCost

scottalanmiller

[Work in Progress]

I am doing some projects utilizing CloudatCost servers assigned to the NTG lab and our first larger one is a Zimbra email and collaboration server. This is built on a CentOS 7 image, fully updated, on a CloudatCost Big Dog VM instance. In this case we are building a fully open source Zimbra 8.6 system.

Notice that Zimbra states that 8GB of RAM is required for a Zimbra installation. A Big Dog 2 instance is recommended for a minimum install.

First we should set up a few basics that are just good starting points for any VM:

yum -y install epel-release sysstat; yum -y install fail2ban htop perl
yum -y install nmap-ncat libaio unzip perl-core
yum -y update
reboot

Next you need to ensure that the public IP address of the Zimbra server has a proper, full entry in its own /etc/hosts file. This is a single line to be added in the form of [ipaddress] [fqdn] [shortname].

Now let's get Zimbra for CentOS 7. There is a direct download available. Zimbra is large, this will take some time.

cd /tmp
wget https://files.zimbra.com/downloads/8.6.0_GA/zcs-8.6.0_GA_1153.RHEL7_64.20141215151110.tgz
tar xzvf zcs-8.6.0_GA_1153.RHEL7_64.20141215151110.tgz
cd zcs-8.6.0_GA_1153.RHEL7_64.20141215151110
./install.sh

This will run for some time but requires nothing more than you accepting the pre-requisites and confirming that you want to continue to modify your system. Nothing to know at this point. Just let Zimbra do its thing.

@scottalanmiller Have you ever used http://www.sogo.nu/ It provides similar features, but is much more lightweight. I Like Zimbra but I tend to think of it as a more bloated/resource heavy system much like exchange is.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

@scottalanmiller Have you ever used http://www.sogo.nu/ It provides similar features, but is much more lightweight. I Like Zimbra but I tend to think of it as a more bloated/resource heavy system much like exchange is.

Have not used Sogo.

JaredBusch

@thecreativeone91 never heard of this prior to now, but I would not use it simply because they do not have CentOS 7 support. This is not a new thing and there is no excuse to not support CentOS 7 if you want me to consider your software.

@JaredBusch It's in the Repo's https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/jaile/sogo/

JaredBusch

@thecreativeone91 I'm not going to dig in repo's when wanting to test/try software. Give me your instructions on your own damn website.

scottalanmiller

@JaredBusch said:

@thecreativeone91 never heard of this prior to now, but I would not use it simply because they do not have CentOS 7 support. This is not a new thing and there is no excuse to not support CentOS 7 if you want me to consider your software.

I've definitely passed on software because they only see themselves as a hobby class project before (FogBugz.) Running on Mint, Fedora, etc. is fine as extra targets, but some combination of up to date RHEL / CentOS, Suse, Ubuntu, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD and Windows is a requirement for enterprise or business class software. If they are not targeting one or more of those, with some like Ubuntu being questionable as acceptable, then they aren't thinking of themselves in the same class that I am looking for software in.

scottalanmiller

@thecreativeone91 said:

@JaredBusch It's in the Repo's https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/jaile/sogo/

Fedora repos are neither the RHEL repos, not the EPEL repos nor SOGO's repos. Until it is all the way to in the OS or supported by the makers, it's not supported yet. Tons of things are RPM'd by third parties for things. But none that I would use in production.