On 2012-02-29 9:15 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
Q: How many concurrent IMAP clients could you serve with this setup before hitting a bottleneck at any point in the architecture?
No idea how to calculate it...
What is the first bottleneck you'd run into?
Unless this is a trick question, the OC-12 link (since it is only 644Mb), and the next bottleneck would be the 2 GbE server connections to the router (are these bonded? if so, what mode?...
The correct answer to this question, and the subsequent discussion that will surely take place, may open your eyes a bit, and prompt you to rethink some of your assumptions that went into the architectural decisions you've presented here.
Since the vast majority of our connections will be *local*, I'm unconcerned about the internet connect speeds (one office has a 100/10Mb Cable (Comcast Business Class) connection, the other will have a 100/100Mb fiber/ethernet connection).
My main priority is that the user experience at each physical location be optimal, which is why I'm more focused on making sure each offices users are connected to only the local server for all services (file/print/mail).
I also neglected to mention how each server would be physically connected to the network, which I guess I should have done, since I'm fairly sure that will be the bottleneck I should mostly be concerned about...
My choices are, as I see it, single GbE connections, or add some multiport GbE cards (these Dells support up to 3 PCIe cards) and bond some ports together for each VM. 10GbE is simply not in our price range (and I don't think we need it anyway), although I did stumble on these while googling and am waiting on pricing, since they claim to be 'much cheaper':
http://www.mellanox.com/ethernet/
Since neither the multi-port GbE cards or decent switches that have reliable support for bonding/teaming are really not that expensive (especially when comparing to 10GbE solutions), I don't really see any reason *not* to do this (at a minimum I'd get redundancy if one of the ports on the server failed), but I'm also not sure which mode would be best - round-robin or IEEE 802.3ad dynamic link aggregation?
Obviously, I don't have the experience or expertise to answer these questions myself (never analyzed IMAP traffic to have an idea of the bandwidth each user uses, and probably wouldn't trust my efforts if I made the attempt). Hopefully, there are some people here who have a rough idea, which is why I brought this question up here.
Oh - and I am/will be working with a local I.T. services company to help with the design and implementation (since obviously I don't have the experience to do this myself), and will be asking them these same questions, I just like to usually know the general answers to questions like this ahead of time, so that I know if the guys I'm hiring know what they are doing and are giving me the best options for my budget.
Thanks for your thoughts...
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Best regards,
Charles