Install VMWare Zimbra 8 Network Edition Appliance in VirtualBox Host

Today I’m going to install the Network Edition Appliance of VMWare’s Zimbra Collaboration Suite in a VirtualBox virtual machine. In another article I will upgrade this to an Open Source Edition appliance and increase the storage capacity of the appliance. We’ve already built our Ubuntu 12.04 LTS headless virtual machine server with the phpvirtualbox package for web-based management which will host this machine.

The first thing I’m going to do is remotely login to my VirtualBox server as the vboxadmin user that we created during the setup:

ssh -l vboxadmin ubuntuvm-server

I’ve already registered for a Network Edition trial license and grabbed the link to download the latest release of the Zimbra appliance from the Zimbra Website (http://www.zimbra.com/products/download_appliance.html). Now I’m going to download the ova to a new folder in the vboxadmin’s user directory. This would be a good time to save the xml license file from your email.

Make the directory for the file and go into that directory:

vboxadmin@ubuntu-vmserver:~$ mkdir zcadnld
vboxadmin@ubuntu-vmserver:~$ cd zcadnld

Download the Zimbra Appliance (8.0.3 is the latest at the time of this writing):

vboxadmin@ubuntu-vmserver:~/zcadnld$ wget http://files3.zimbra.com/downloads/8.0.3_GA/zca-8.0.3.0-1043216_OVF10.ova

The appliance comes in an OVA package format. Thankfully this is just a packaged collection of the virtual machine files, so we can extract it to the current directory:

vboxadmin@ubuntu-vmserver:~/zcadnld$ tar -xvf zca-8.0.3.0-1043216_OVF10.ova
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216_OVF10.ovf
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216_OVF10.mf
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216_OVF10.cert
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-system.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-zimbra.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-store.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-db.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-index.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-redolog.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-log.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-backup.vmdk
zca-8.0.3.0-1043216-data.vmdk
vboxadmin@ubuntu-vmserver:~/zcadnld$

Now I’m going to go to the phpvirtualbox web-interface and import the Zimbra Appliance

From your PHPVirtualBox web-interface, select File>Import Appliance.

In the “Import Appliance” dialogue click the folder to browse. Select the Zimbra OVF we extracted and click OK.

Click Next and the Import Appliance Wizard will proceed to find your appliance.

Depending on your VirtualBox Server’s hardware configuration, either click Import to accept the default configuration, or make adjustments to the hardware in your Zimbra Virtual Appliance, (RAM, CPU cores, etc.) and then click Import.

Click agree and the import process will complete.

Now it’s time to boot the appliance and begin configuration.

The initial boot-up process will bring you to the EULA at the console for the Zimbra Appliance. Read through the agreement. Type yes and hit enter to agree to the license. The initial appliance setup will continue.

Hit enter on *Login. The default user/pass is root/vmware. Then setup your server with a static IP address.

Now you can just exit out of the server’s console and proceed to the web-based setup.

Open a browser and navigate to your Zimbra server at https://your-zimbra-server:5480

Login as the root user and click on Reset/Initial Install

For this Zimbra installation I’m going to select Single Node and click begin Installation.

On the next page enter the hostname, IP Address, password, domain, proxy information, (if applicable), and time zone. Click Next

Click Choose File to browse for the license from your email. And then click begin install. This can take a while depending on your Virtual Machine’s hardware configuration.

Once the installation is complete, you can click done.

Now you can go login to the server as the root user and setup your Zimbra Collaboration Appliance at https://yourserver:7071

You can setup and use your new Zimbra Network Edition Appliance for 60 days with this license.  I won’t be using any of the features of the Network Edition for this deployment, so I’m going to “Upgrade” this Zimbra Network Edition Appliance to a Zimbra Open Source Edition. After that, I’m going to increase the storage volume for the Zimbra Open Source Edition Appliance.