Archive for » August, 2009 «

Aug
31

Zimbra Appliance with openSUSE 11.1 : VMWare/VirtualBox Image

opensuse-zimbraAs I have explained in previous articles, my current project is to build a Zimbra Appliance on top of openSUSE 11.1. Zimbra Appliance created by SUSE Studio tools and contains openSUSE JeOS with Zimbra and any dependencies packages.

Zimbra Appliance will make  an installation process lot easier than manually installing package and make changes to some configuration files.

I prepared the appliance with 2 edition and 3 varians for each edition. The Standard Edition contains openSUSE JeOS as base OS with additional bundled application including DNS Server packages, Zimbra auto install script and Zimbra binary installer. It’s size about 630 MB. Another edition is Lite Edition, contains openSUSE JeOS as base OS with additional bundled application including DNS Server packages, Zimbra auto install script but without Zimbra Binary Installer.

Each edition has 3 varians for deploy & implementation. VMWare & VirtualBox image for virtualisasi, ISO Image for standard installation using live installer and LiveUSB for handy installation image. This post will focused on VmWare & VirtualBox image, others will explain on next post.

All of appliance has been tested on Pentium 4 PC with minimal 1 GB of RAM. The VMWare/VirtualBox appliance tested with VirtualBox version 3.0.4 on openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2 Milestone 6 (Oh, yes, I’m using Zimbra vmdk file as VirtualBox Harddisk image). Please refer to Zimbra System Requirement for more information regarding hardware specification.

built-with-susestudio

Technical Specification

  • Based on openSUSE JeOS ver 11.1
  • Include default package for network package (Ping utilities, wget and w3m)
  • Include Zypper  & Rsync package. Zypper for extending package installation, Rsync for transfering data
  • Using latest Zimbra stable 5.0.18 (also tested with Zimbra 6.0 RC1 with a few changes on binary installer name)

DOWNLOAD (Mirror are welcome)

  1. http://vavai.net/zimbra-studio/

For Indonesian, please used Indonesian openSUSE Community mirror or Indonesian Zimbra Community Links :

HOW To USE (for VMWare or VirtualBox)

  • Download the Zimbra Appliance for VMWare with vmx.tar.gz extension,ex : Zimbra_openSUSE_Standard_Edition.i686-11.1.5.vmx.tar.gz. If you prefer to used the lite version, please download binary Zimbra installer version 5.0.18 for openSUSE from this link : http://www.zimbra.com/community/downloads.html.
  • Ekstrak or decompress into specified folder. Please make sure that you have full access into the folder
  • Create a new OS on VMWare or VirtualBox with RAM more than 512 MB (recommended : 1 GB or more depending your amount of email account). For harddisk, choose to use an existing disk and take the vmdk file from your extract folder.
  • Starting VMWare/VirtualBox Application
  • For initial boot, Zimbra Appliance will aksed for hostname and IP Address. Enter your hostname with fully qualified domain name (FQDN, ex, hostname : mail, domain : vavai.net) and IP Address. Make sure the option “Change Hostname…” has unchecked.
  • Login with user name : root and password : opensuse or  username : opensuse with password : geeko
  • Change to folder  /opt/zimbra-auto (cd /opt/zimbra-auto) and start the installation script 
    cd /opt/zimbra-auto
sh setup-en.sh

    zimbra-appliance1
    `
    zimbra-appliance2
    `
    zimbra-appliance3
    `
    zimbra-appliance4

    zimbra-appliance5

    zimbra-appliance6

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Although it was the first release for Zimbra Appliance, I’m using version 11.1.5 as initial version. 11.1 stand for base OS while 5 stand for 5 times update.

Category: Headline, OpenSUSE, Zimbra  Tags: ,  10 Comments
Aug
30

Indonesian openSUSE Event : Zimbra Community Training

Last week, I went  to Surabaya,  a capital city of the province of East Java for attending Zimbra Mail Server & Collaboration Suite community training  initiated by  Indonesian openSUSE community, East Java branch.

The training itself dedicated for openSUSE promotional event for server side. Beside my activity as Indonesian openSUSE member, I also become a founder for Indonesian Zimbra Community. I think it would be a good idea to make openSUSE as primary choice, both for desktop and server application. Zimbra has it’s own benefit. The combination between it’s feature and price (priceless for open source edition) making Zimbra as an attractive option for mail server.

training-zimbra2

training-zimbra1

Although I have successfull testing for Zimbra installation on top of openSUSE 11.x, I decided to use openSUSE 10.3 as base OS because openSUSE 10.3 need a lower hardware specification compared to 11.x.

openSUSE 10.3 as base OS installed using network installation process, and it’s help much for simplifying repository configuration.

training-zimbra3

The participants very enthusiast to listened the benefit of Zimbra; the features on Zimbra compared with Microsoft Exchange Server and others mail server; why I choose openSUSE as based OS and about community support  both with Zimbra community and openSUSE community.

training-zimbra4

training-zimbra5

training-zimbra6

After break for lunch and pray, training continued with Zimbra management and tips-trick for managing Zimbra account (create, bulk provision, import-export,etc)

training-zimbra7

training-zimbra8

training-zimbra9

training-zimbra10

I will come back to Surabaya for another community training on October 2009 : Migration from Windows Server into Linux Server using openSUSE Linux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surabayaexplained
Category: Headline, OpenSUSE, Zimbra  Tags: ,  One Comment
Aug
30

Zimbra 6.0 RC1 on openSUSE 11.1

zimbra-6-rc1

According to Zimbra Product Portal, the version 6.0 GunsNRoses will be officially launched on August 31, 2009. It’s a major upgrade from the latest release, Zimbra 5.0.18. The RC1has about 1104 bugs and features fixed, with 2636 bugs and features fixed since 5.0.

As of version 6.0, openSUSE didn’t officially supported by Zimbra and only SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 supported by default, both for x86 and 64 bit. SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 also unsupported on this release.

It’s a bad news anyway, actually for me who implemented Zimbra on top of openSUSE in various company in Indonesia. I don’t want to leave openSUSE as second-class citizen on Zimbra community so I’m trying to make Zimbra running well on openSUSE 11.x (and SLES 11) although it was not officially supported. After a few trial and error, I could make Zimbra 5.0.X and Zimbra 6.0 RC1 running well on openSUSE 11.1

Zimbra 5.0.x deployed on openSUSE 11.1 using binary installer for openSUSE 10.2 while Zimbra 6.0 RC1 deployed on openSUSE 11.1 using binary installer for SLES 10. I know it would a risk scenario because it was not officially supported, but I think it would be the one and only way to push Zimbra to provided official binary installer for openSUSE 11.x. openSUSE was dropping from Zimbra supported distro with the reason : a few installed system on top of openSUSE, so increasing the number of Zimbra installed on openSUSE may the only answer.

zcs6rc1-status

Below is the Zimbra installer script for openSUSE 11.1 and 6.0 RC1 : zimbra-auto-en.tar.gz

Install it on your openSUSE 11.1 by following this :

  1. Download the script and extract on /opt so there should be an /opt/zimbra-auto folder
  2. Copy the binary installer of Zimbra 6.0 RC1 for SLES 10 into /opt/zimbra-auto. The binary installer available here.
  3. Open konsole/terminal, go to /opt/zimbra-auto folder and run the installer by typing : sh setup-en.sh

I’m also preparing to build Zimbra Appliance using openSUSE 11.1. Please wait for a few day later :-)

Article in Bahasa Indonesia available here.

Category: OpenSUSE, Zimbra  Tags: ,  9 Comments

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