For a long time I was running Mail Enable, a Windows based mail server application for my private emails. Mail Enable is free when you just host a few domains on it but the disadvantage for me was that it’s just offering plain email services like SMTP and POP3, no calendar or task management. Since VMware acquired Zimbra at the beginning of this year I was thinking about a installation of their Zimbra Collaboration Server. Last week I’ve ordered a Vserver at Host Europe, to install Zimbra and already at Tuesday the delivered the login information. As the Vserver was preconfigured with a mail and web server  I had to “clean” the machine before I could install ZCS. Today I finally got everything working and I’ve send and received my first email.

During the next weeks I’ll write more about my experience with Zimbra and hope this is also useful for you. It was a bit tricky to get it running because my server just has 1 GB of RAM but I found a lot of good information on the Zimbra Forums which helped me.

First of all I’ll give you the advice that 1 GB of memory will work but for a production environment you’ll definitely need more. I’ve found loads of article on the web saying that 2 GB are ok for a small installation. From my view: It depends! It depends on what you want to use from a functional level. Due to my lack of RAM resources I’ve deactivated some features but I’ll talk about that in another article.

For a Zimbra installation you’ll need a supported operating system. You can find an overview of those and also the system requirements are here. I’ve used an Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS 64-Bit because I already worked with Ubuntu before. As I said before, for development and testing purposes, 1 GB of memory will be enough. Be sure before you install ZCS that you’ve a clean Linux installation without installed web server or mail components because your installation will not end successful. This is because Zimbra brings it’s own Apache, MySQL and Postfix instance with it and needs to use the standard ports 25, 80, 443 and more. If you have met the requirements you can download the ZCS Open Source Edition for free. In my articles I’ll write specific about an installation on Ubuntu and a Vserver which could differ in regards to the configuration and tuning of the OS and ZCS.

Similar Posts:

• Preparing Ubuntu and Install Zimbra CS
• Important commands you’ll need for Zimbra
• Optimizing performance for VPS and low RAM
• Configuring Zimbra Desktop with a ZCS
• Zimbra (Software) Server Updates and Backup