April 29, 2019 at 11:59Install Zimbra Open-Source Edition on CentOS 7
During the design of the Zimbra implementation at the enterprise, the IT manager has to choose the operating system on which the Zimbra infrastructure nodes will operate. Today, almost all Linux distributions are compatible with Zimbra, right up to the domestic red OS and ROSA. Typically, the choice for installing Zimbra in enterprises is either Ubuntu or RHEL, as commercial companies are developing these distributions. Often, however, the choice of IT managers falls on Cent OS, which is a community-based fork of the commercial RHEL distribution from Red Hat.
Zimbra minimum system requirements include 8 GB of RAM on the server, at least 5 gigabytes of free space in the / opt folder, as well as a fully-fledged domain name and MX record. As a rule, the biggest problems for beginners arise precisely with the last two points. The big advantage of CentOS 7 in this case is that it allows you to set the server domain name at the stage of installation of the operating system. This allows you to install Zimbra Collaboration Suite without any problems, even for those users who before that did not have any experience with Linux.
In our case, the domain name of the server on which Zimbra will be installed is mail.company.ru. After the installation is completed, it remains only to add a line of the form 192.168.0.61 mail.company.ru mail, where instead of 192.168.0.61 it is necessary to register the static IP address of your server. After that, you need to install all package updates, as well as add A and MX records on the server using the dig -t A mail.company.ru and dig -t MX company.ru commands . Thus, our server will have a full-fledged domain name and now you can easily install Zimbra on it.
You can download the archive with the current version of the Zimbra distribution from the official site zimbra.com . After the archive is unpacked, it remains only to run the installation script named install.sh. The set of console commands that you need for this is as follows:
Immediately after this, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite installer starts. First of all, you will have to accept the license agreement in order to continue the installation of ZCS. The next step will be the selection of modules for installation. If you want to create one mail server, then it makes sense to install all the packages at once. If you intend to create a multi-server infrastructure with scalability, you should choose only a few of the packages proposed for installation, as described in one of our previous articles.
After the installation is complete, the Zimbra setup menu will open directly in the terminal. If you selected a single-server installation, then you just need to set the administrator password. To do this, first select item number 7, and then item 4 to set the administrator password, which must be at least 6 characters. After the password has been set, press the R button to return to the previous menu, and then the A button to accept the changes.
After the Zimbra installation is complete, open the ports necessary for its operation in the firewall with the command firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port = {25,80,110,143,443,465,587,993,995,5222,5223,9071,7071} / tcp , and then restart the firewall with the command firewall-cmd --reload
Now we just have to start Zimbra with the service zimbra start command to get started. You can access the administration console in the browser by going to company.ru : 7071 / zimbraAdmin / . Access for email users will be provided at mail.company.ru . Note that in case of any problems or errors during Zimbra operation, the answer should be looked for in the logs, which can be found in the / opt / zimbra / log folder .
Once the Zimbra installation is complete, you can also install the Zextras Suite extensions, which can increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of using Zimbra by adding business-relevant features to it. To do this, you need to download from the site Zextras.com file with the latest version Zextras Suite and unpack it. After that, go to the unpacked folder and run the installation script. The whole process in console form is as follows:
After that, your Zimbra will have the opportunity to archive and deduplicate data in mail storages, mount secondary volumes, delegate administrator privileges to other users, use online chat directly in the Zimbra web client, and much more.
For all questions related to the Zextras Suite, you can contact the representative of Zextras Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com
Zimbra minimum system requirements include 8 GB of RAM on the server, at least 5 gigabytes of free space in the / opt folder, as well as a fully-fledged domain name and MX record. As a rule, the biggest problems for beginners arise precisely with the last two points. The big advantage of CentOS 7 in this case is that it allows you to set the server domain name at the stage of installation of the operating system. This allows you to install Zimbra Collaboration Suite without any problems, even for those users who before that did not have any experience with Linux.
In our case, the domain name of the server on which Zimbra will be installed is mail.company.ru. After the installation is completed, it remains only to add a line of the form 192.168.0.61 mail.company.ru mail, where instead of 192.168.0.61 it is necessary to register the static IP address of your server. After that, you need to install all package updates, as well as add A and MX records on the server using the dig -t A mail.company.ru and dig -t MX company.ru commands . Thus, our server will have a full-fledged domain name and now you can easily install Zimbra on it.
You can download the archive with the current version of the Zimbra distribution from the official site zimbra.com . After the archive is unpacked, it remains only to run the installation script named install.sh. The set of console commands that you need for this is as follows:
Zimbra && cd the mkdir Zimbra
the wget files.zimbra.com/downloads/8.8.12_GA/zcs-8.8.12_GA_3794.RHEL7_64.20190329045002.tgz --no-check-certificate
tar will zxpvf ZCS-8.8.12_GA_3794.RHEL7_64.20190329045002.tgz
cd zcs-8.8.12_GA_3794.RHEL7_64.20190329045002
./install.sh
Immediately after this, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite installer starts. First of all, you will have to accept the license agreement in order to continue the installation of ZCS. The next step will be the selection of modules for installation. If you want to create one mail server, then it makes sense to install all the packages at once. If you intend to create a multi-server infrastructure with scalability, you should choose only a few of the packages proposed for installation, as described in one of our previous articles.
After the installation is complete, the Zimbra setup menu will open directly in the terminal. If you selected a single-server installation, then you just need to set the administrator password. To do this, first select item number 7, and then item 4 to set the administrator password, which must be at least 6 characters. After the password has been set, press the R button to return to the previous menu, and then the A button to accept the changes.
After the Zimbra installation is complete, open the ports necessary for its operation in the firewall with the command firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port = {25,80,110,143,443,465,587,993,995,5222,5223,9071,7071} / tcp , and then restart the firewall with the command firewall-cmd --reload
Now we just have to start Zimbra with the service zimbra start command to get started. You can access the administration console in the browser by going to company.ru : 7071 / zimbraAdmin / . Access for email users will be provided at mail.company.ru . Note that in case of any problems or errors during Zimbra operation, the answer should be looked for in the logs, which can be found in the / opt / zimbra / log folder .
Once the Zimbra installation is complete, you can also install the Zextras Suite extensions, which can increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of using Zimbra by adding business-relevant features to it. To do this, you need to download from the site Zextras.com file with the latest version Zextras Suite and unpack it. After that, go to the unpacked folder and run the installation script. The whole process in console form is as follows:
wget download.zextras.com/zextras_suite-latest.tgz
tar xfz zextras_suite-latest.tgz
cd zextras_suite /
./install.sh all
After that, your Zimbra will have the opportunity to archive and deduplicate data in mail storages, mount secondary volumes, delegate administrator privileges to other users, use online chat directly in the Zimbra web client, and much more.
For all questions related to the Zextras Suite, you can contact the representative of Zextras Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com