Zend Server is a complete, enterprise-ready Web Application Server for running and managing PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance and security.

I haven’t tried it – probably it will be commercial solution (Zend Studio == Zend Platform?) and I’m not looking for one right one. So I jumped over to Zend Server CE (Community Edition) which is:

The free community edition of Zend Server enables you to set up a complete PHP environment in minutes, and run non-critical PHP applications in development, testing and production

Main differences lie deep inside PHP configuration – not-community version is much more tweaked for performance and production servers, where community edition is for development environments.

To start with, installing Zend Server is a joke and can be done in no-time. Download one file from here, extract it and run in terminal. Thats it! After installation web server was accessible on localhost:10088 and web-based configuration on localhost:10082/ZendServer. Everything worked smoothly and without any errors.

Web interface gives access to server logs, PHP parameters (allows  you to change them, restart server), extensions, debugger, Zend products configuration (Optimizer, Java Bridge, etc.) and some more. If they just add Apache VirtualHosts configuration it would be perfect for me, because I’m still doing it by hand.

Performance is subjective and can’t be judged fast, so I’m not going to compare this package to standalone servers. Probably it will run faster or at least as fast as default configuration Apache+PHP. I do believe that Zend made some configuration improvements, but you only need them if you can’t (or are to lazy) do them yourself.

I have been using standard Apache, PHP, MySQL servers for ages, and haven’t really ever tried anything like this. It’s really user friendly, gives a lot of power through simple interface, and what’s most important is very easy to setup. Probably Xampp (or just running sudo apt-get install apache2 php5) can be installable as fast as Zend Server, but in my belief, Zend Server is much more production-like environment. Depends what you need.