From: Cami (no email)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2004 - 08:24:50 EDT
>> Yup.. We have 9 active (and 9 passive mailhosts) with 150gig of space
>> on each LUN/mailstore.. The entire userbase is spread out evenlyover
>> all the mailhosts which makes things a pure dream to admin/maintain..
>>
>> Everything ofcourse is complete transparent to the entire userbase so
>> no user ever has to know on which mailhost they reside on..
>
> However, in this case, you waste 2 times the computing power... I don't
> know for how many users we're talking about,
Over 350 000 users.
> and what do you consider a
> mailhost, but for 50,000 users we have 2 mail servers, 2 pop readers and 1
> imap reader, and they are working in load balancing mode, rather than
> standby mode.
The only thing that is in standy-mode is the mailhosts.. The pop3/imap
proxies, aswell as spam layer, aswell as incoming MX layer all user
load balancing..
> Your solution might be faster (performance wise), but is
Not just faster, its more stable.
> more expensive in all other aspects
Not quite, hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper..
> and of course harder to manage than one single spool.
Where do you get that idea from? Think about what happens
if that single mail spool filesystem becomes corrupted..
Spreading your spool across multiple machines ensures
minimal impact when things go wrong.. Also, having your
mailhosts in an active/passive configuration allows
you to perform drastic changes and maintence without
requiring hours of downtime..
Granted, no clustering is perfect, but the point is to
ensure everything is as stable as possible.. If hardware
is *really* that much of an issue in terms of cost, you
can have 6 active nodes and 1 passive which will automatically
take over if any of the active nodes fail.
Cami
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