# Setting up a VPS on OVH for SmarterMail or Zimbra



## mobilius (Sep 23, 2014)

Hello everyone! 

 

I'm new in the area, so I have no knowledge. 

I currently have a VPS with OVH and I would strongly install SmarterMail 12 or Zimbra. 

 

I do not know what distribution to take the installation is as easy as possible. 

 

Win2k08 with Plesk Win2k12 R2 with Or Without plesk. 

ArcLinux, Centos, Debian, Parallel Plesk with W2k08, W2k12, Centos or Debian. 

 

I am starting from 0. 

Wich distribution or OS I should use? 

What is better SmarterMail or Zimbra? 

I must necessarily have activesync. 

 

A pro to help me?


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## HalfEatenPie (Sep 23, 2014)

I don't know much about SmarterMail, but I'm running Zimbra on a VPS right now.  

Zimbra can be installed on CentOS, SUSE, or Ubuntu.  Because I'm a bigger fan of Debian I installed it on Ubuntu.

Be forewarned, Zimbra is a software coded in Java.  Meaning it's initially incredibly resource intensive, but scales up really nicely for more users.  It's not an ideal software for OpenVZ.  

Here's the memory usage of Zimbra on my personal box...



             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2048       1773        274          2          0         74
-/+ buffers/cache:       1698        349
Swap:          464        464          0
It's on a 2GB OpenVZ VPS with only one user (me) and it's using up 1.7 GB of RAM.  So if it's an OVH OpenVZ VPS, you should probably be using some of the higher tier plans (also, from my experience, OVH's OpenVZ VPSes were restarting once a week...  For a mail server though, this is almost unacceptable.)

From what I can tell looking at SmarterMail, it's a Windows Server IIS.  That by itself comes with licensing costs for Windows Server (unless you go through Oktay's Winity) and is in the field of Windows System Admining which I currently don't know enough about (as I am currently more knowledgeable in Linux Systems).  

Of course, you're not me.  Therefore, go with whatever you're comfortable with.  This is an absolute Linux vs Windows Server debate.


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## mobilius (Sep 23, 2014)

Hi thanks for the infos.

On my side i use VPS Cloud2 with 4GB.

I am not familiar with Linux/Debian and same thing with M$ products (server).

I've try many thing and no one work (wp, joomla, smartmail, etc)  

Turn around is my new devise!

With linux / debian, it was possible to have an graphic interface (like windows)?

Possible to connect in RDP (like windows)?

I am a newbie and i try to learn.


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## HalfEatenPie (Sep 23, 2014)

I understand the want and the "need" for a graphics interface, but honestly I'd say you should learn Bash (Linux) and Powershell (Windows).  

But if you really want, you can install XRDP, VNC, X2Go, whatever for Linux and use Gnome/xfce/KDE/etc.  There's a ton of resources on the internet about them. 

It's not no-one works, it's that you probably need a bit more guidance on how to get them to work properly.  It can be frustrating at times, but with a ton of help from Documentations and Google Searches you can make almost anything work (to an extent).  If you're looking for a straight mail system/application then why not just run Vesta on a 512MB VPS or something and run mail out of that?  That's what @jarland's doing (of course with a ton of customization for MXRoute, which is awesome and is what makes it awesome)


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