[Dovecot] Re: Dovecot servers / SAN

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 11:56:04AM +0500, Mustafa A. Hashmi wrote:
> On 6/19/06, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at atrpms.net> wrote:
> >On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 09:43:26PM +1000, Dean Manners wrote:
> >> Hey guys,
> >>                     Wondering if anyone out there has any input on 
> >running
> >> Dovecot with SAN storage.  Its coming to the time where we need to run 
> >load
> >> balanced servers, and past experiences steer us away from a NAS.  Tips /
> >> pitfalls ?
> >
> >It probably depends more on the filesystem you're going to pave over
> >your SAN. I had a test setup with three nodes over GFS (which from
> >dovecot's POV is simply a local POSIX compliant fs) for a couple of
> >weeks and it worked fine. But for other reasons it never went into
> >production, it was only stressed under lab conditions.
> 
> We ran it with a Lustre backend recently for test purposes. Though the
> solution worked well, didn't make sense given Lustre's design.
> 
> Axel: why did you move away from GFS? Any particular reason?

The customer I was working for was an early adopter of GFS 6.1 (aka
GFS on 2.6) in the hopes that Debian would pick it up, since Debian is
the Linux distribution he is running.

When it became apparent that this would not happen within the
project's time constraints he had to choose between a cluttered server
os landscape vs non having active-active cluster filesystem setups and
due to staff constraints chose to freeze the GFS project
altogether. That wasn't dovecot or in general mail related.

So unless you face the same constraints, e.g. run a distribution w/o a
cluster file system and would have to do it yourself from scratch,
going GFS (or OCFS2) is a good idea for dovecot (and exim which was
the MTA choice).

I would recommend RHEL4/GFS/dovecot/exim (+ spamassassin/clamav and
friends) for a nice scalable cluster solution. In fact the customer's
and ATrpms' mail setup is the one I created for the GFS cluster, it
now just has one active node (the customer for the reasons above and
ATrpms due to not having a SAN :).
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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