Doymer Consultores

Open source version of Zimbra, Zimbra Community Edition or ZCS, is a mail server that has become very popular because its high number of features. But the fact of being it free limit the number of goodies that the owner include being the making of backup copies of our mailboxes one of them.

There are many web pages where you are shown how to make backups of this version but they have one or more of these drawbacks:

• You have to stop the mail server
• You have to backup account by account, though there are scripts that automate this process some way or other
• They require the datastore to be in a LVM volume
• The are not free

In this article we show you an alternate method that overcome this drawbacks and allow you to make consistent hot copies of your mail server.

During the creation of a virtual machine shapshot in vSphere 5 or 5.1 you may get a “disk is full” error like this one:

The operation on the file "/vmfs/devices/multiextent/3ec865dc-xxxx.vmdk" failed (The file is too large). The file system where disk "/vmfs/devices/multiextent/3ec865dc-xxxx.vmdk" resides is full.

Select Retry to attempt the operation again.

Select Cancel to end the session.

Retry is useless because the error happens again so the only left option is to Cancel and, when doing that, you may get this other scary message:

VMware ESX cannot synchronize with the disk before canceling. Disk /vmfs/devices/multiextent/3ec865dc-xxxx.vmdk may be inconsistent.

If your VM is on it will be shut off and then you will not be able to start it again.

A 'feature' that I have never liked about the way that Sonicwall help-desk manage your incidents is the fact that mail notifications and updates about the case does not include the text of the engenier's reply but a link to the help-desk page. So, instead of being able to directly read the reply of the engenier you have to go to the corresponding case page and authenticate yourself just to be able to know what they are telling you. Something really bothersome and not very efficient.

Not enough, from some time ago now the link that suposedly should take you to the incident page does not work.

Como administrador de algunos sistemas corporativos es una de mis responsabilidades el garantizar que los datos estén disponibles en caso de desastre. Esta tarea, que a todos nos parece obvia en el entorno empresarial, a veces se descuida cuando los datos a proteger son los que tenemos en nuestros equipos de casa. Preocuparnos de la protección de estos datos debe ser una tarea que no debieramos descuidar.