Long have I looked forward to Zimbra having disaster recovery through server to server sync. It would have made things better in my organization in a DR situation. In lieu of not having this feature we live mirror replicate the Zimbra store server LUNs between data centrers on our XIVs. So our DR strategy is to use our backup store servers on the replicated LUNs. Setting this up would take some time. It would be much better if they were already in the Zimbra cluster all the time and flipping them over to be the master would be a "supported feature" not something a sys admin has to do by configuring another instance of the store server by using the same data.
Zimbra promised me this feature years ago and today they backed out and ask that we just implement this feature by running Zimbra on VMware and buying vCenter Site Recovery Manager. However, we don't want proprietary lock-in reaching down into our virtualization platform so we don't use VMware and instead use KVM. We like Zimbra because it's built with non-proprietary components aside from the active-sync and Outlook connectors which we liked having since lots of people want an Exchange-like interface and we can keep the proprietary code/protocols in their own little bucket.
Zimbra is calling lots of attention to VMware's features as opposed to what a future version of Zimbra was supposed to have:
"This enhancement requests asks to sync an active server to a passive server, we'll never do this. It's a legacy failover model when their are new technology options to provide elastic scaling and (geo)redundancy with stateless application servers and distributed data. It's taken some time for these technologies to progress to the point where they are viable enough for applications like Zimbra that need data consistency and atomic transactions."Let's look at this more simply. VMware can sync VM objects. Zimbra was supposed to be able to sync Zimbra objects. If you run Zimbra on VMware then you can just use the sync'd VMware objects for DR but if you don't run VMware then it would be nice to have sync'd Zimbra objects. Sycing objects to a recovery site is not legacy. What's changed is the type of objects.
Update: Zimbra re-opened the feature request. I'm glad the community put enough pressure on them.
