Virtualization Daily

Zimbra CTO Scott Dietzen has posted a short blog post announcing a Beta release of Zimbra 4.5 in a virtual appliance.

Software appliances promise to augment Software as a Service (SaaS) as an easier, cheaper way to use third-party software, especially by lowering the cost of managing independently changing subcomponents of a software “stack”—application logic, database, web application server, virtual machine, operating system, and so on. For our 1.0 software appliance, Zimbra has teamed up with rPath (think Linux distribution for software appliances), and for virualized deployment thereof, VMware. For a more detailed discussion of our thoughts on software appliances as well as our technical collaboration to date with rPath and VMware, please see our recently posted whitepaper. And for those that would much rather try out our initial bootable ISO or VMware appliance images, they are now posted on Zimbra’s standard download pages for the Network Edition, and shortly, for the Open Source Edition as well. Feedback most welcome, either on the paper or, better yet, on the software appliance itself.

Zimbra has also published a nine page white paper providing a more in depth look at their use of virtual appliances. This is a pretty compelling statement.

However, when offered the choice of a Windows port of ZCS or a software
appliance in the form of a bootable disk that only requires the user to install,
configure, and administer the ZCS application, such SMBs have so far
overwhelmingly voted for a software appliance over a Windows port. After all,
who wants another Windows server (or any OS for that matter) to manage and
secure? (And even if you do still want to run ZCS on Windows, why not
leverage virtualization technology to make that easier to manage?—See below.)

Zimbra is a perfect candidate for a virtual appliance. The software, even with their installer scripts, requires some effort to install. With a virtual appliance that effort is dramatically reduced. The white paper is well worth a read if you have any interest in virtual appliances.