On 10/30/06, Joshua Goodall <joshua_goodall@pacific.net.au> wrote:

...

I recommend a pair of NetApp filers (e.g. 2 x 3020c) exporting NFS from
shared disk shelves in their high-availability mode. This is a hybrid
of the two options, except a) it's a fully supported and stable NetApp
configuration, b) they're sharing disk storage, c) you're not hog-tied
to GFS, d) it's the best NFS implementation in the world (you can even
trust the fcntl locking), e) it's really fast, f) NetApp's onboard
snapshots and other funky software bits will make you wonder how you
lived without them, g) the HA actually works.

I have a six-digit userbase with mailboxes in this configuration.

JG

We are in the process of rolling out / migrating mail from various "other" imap stores to a cluster of two servers running dovecot-1.0.beta9 attached to a 3050c cluster. Hosts are running RHEL4u3 on x86_64 on the latest official kernel, 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp. NFS mount options on both machines are (rw,nosuid,nodev,tcp,nfsvers=3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft,intr,noac,actimeo=0). We are using default_mail_env with Maildir/indices stored over NFS. Postfix with procmail delivery. Currently we are using DNS round robin as there is no SLB in the mix just yet. It is extremely fast.

The only thing I am still mildly concerned about are some errors regarding index corruption. These are seen on both machines. Hopefully a newer version fixes these. See below:

dovecot: Oct 31 11:56:52 Error: IMAP(user): Corrupted index cache file mailstore/user/Maildir/.My-Folder.blah/dovecot.index.cache: invalid record size

These errors don't appear to have any impact on the client side, performance or otherwise.