[leonroy]

Running similar setups on my home lab and company lab:

* VMware VSphere/ESXi

* JIRA / Confluence (managing tickets and wiki)

* FreeNAS (server facing file server duties)

* Synology (user facing file serving duties)

* Zimbra (mail server)

* pfSense (gateway, dhcp, dns, vlans)

* SIPP (SIP endpoint testing)

* Elastix (Asterisk PBX/VoIP Server)

* Windows Server (DNS, DHCP, file serving)

* Openfire (XMPP/Jabber server)

* NAKIVO (VMware backup server)

* Zabbix (SNMP/IPMI/Server monitoring server - amazing product but a PITA to setup)

Thinking about trying Proxmox though once my VMware licenses come up for renewal.

As an aside the most trouble free, zero maintenance server in my home lab is the Windows Server. Updates itself without filling up /boot and killing itself (Ubuntu I’m looking at you...). It takes up hardly any resources on the Hypervisor and just runs and runs. Haven't had to login to it in years.

Really wish Microsoft brought that rock solid ethos to Windows 10. Their server products are absolutely incredible.

[executesorder66]

Do you use Zimbra at work? How is that compared to using Exchange for example?

Any drawbacks?

[leonroy]

Yep, we use Zimbra for company mail. I've only used Office 365 though not Exchange standalone so my comparison reflects that.

Pros for Zimbra are:

It supports Exchange Web Services and ActiveSync so you get complete feature parity for setting up Macs/iOS and other Exchange supporting devices. Makes it as easy setting up users as a full O365 setup.

Licenses are pretty cheap, we're paying I think £400-500 for 25 users per annum.

The web interface is good and has very strong feature support for aliases, mail filtering (O365 filtering is abysmal).

Supports adding External mail IMAP/POP accounts so you can send/receive all your Gmail emails from Zimbra.

It is very standards compliant with excellent IMAP, CalDAV, SMTPS, POP3, EWS, ActiveSync support. No half baked support unlike IMAP on Exchange or Gmail which occasionally does something protocol hostile.

Cons:

Zimbra web interface is not as good as Gmail or O365. It's okay though and feature rich.

If maintaining your own deployment expect some hours put in setting up the usual stuff like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, LetsEncrypt.

Standard support is slow although they do eventually get the issue fixed.

I don't believe Zimbra supports anything like O365's Shared Mailbox feature.

Spam filtering is not great, certainly not compared to Gmail.

[executesorder66]

Thanks for your reply.

It has always annoyed me that almost everyone uses exchange or gmail. It's refreshing to see people use something else.