Some time ago I started to experiment with Zimbra a little bit. I already installed it a few times, and I heard many good things about the new release.

Because I ran into several issues with Debian and Ubuntu in the past, I decided to try Zimbra on CentOS. So I installed a clean CentOS 5.4 VM to test Zimbra on. I downloaded ZCS 6.0.3 for RHEL5, and then the fun started ...

Quickly discovered I had to add --platform-override as an option to ./install.sh, because otherwise it would complain about an incorrect /etc/redhat-release file. So after fixing some dependencies, and answering some questions, the rpm's were being installed. After that, it took a very long time doing nothing. Looking in top, there was a java process using 100% CPU the whole time. After about 90 minutes, Zimbra finally gave me the configuration menu. When I tried to set a password for the admin account, it left me waiting for more than 10 minutes again.

Tired of the waiting, I pressed ctrl-c, and tried the same ZCS version, but for Ubuntu. I still had an Ubuntu VM on my workstation that was used for Zimbra testing before. Ran ./install.sh -u to remove the previous Zimbra on that machine (5.5), and then ran install.sh from the new version.

I ended up with a fully working Zimbra in a matter of minutes...

So, is this a problem with ZCS 6.0.3 for RHEL5? Or is it because I tried CentOS rather than the real RHEL? Who knows ... I ended up creating a new Debian Lenny VM on the same virtualization platform as the CentOS VM, same amount of memory, same amount of CPU's, and Zimbra installed in a matter of minutes again.