I recently installed Zend Server CE on my MacBook Pro to check out the performance of the "partial page" caching Zend offers in their platform.
I was pleasantly surprised how simple it was to get up and running. Zend Platform CE installs its own version of Apache, PHP. If you're installing it on Windows or Mac, it will also install MySQL.
Everything is configured and controlled in your zend path. By default on the Mac it is /usr/local/zend.
The community edition gives you a very simplistic web UI to enable/disable PHP modules. It also allows you to enable/disable as well as clear cache and restart your stack.
If you would like to run Zend Server CE on CentOS, you can install it via Yum. The nice thing about this is that it will put apache in the normal place you would find it in CentOS (/etc/httpd) and map all your normal executables correctly.
I found this setup here, but I will post the config anyway in case it's deleted.
1) Add the code below to a file named: /etc/yum.repos.d/zend.repo
[Zend]name=Zend CE $releasever - $basearch - Released Updatesbaseurl=http://repos.zend.com/rpm/ce/$basearch/enabled=1gpgcheck=0[Zendce-noarch]name=Zend CE - noarchbaseurl=http://repos.zend.com/rpm/ce/noarchenabled=1gpgcheck=0
2) Then run: yum install zend-ce
3) You can access the Zend CE control panel via: http://example.com:10081