On 2023-07-19 4:08 pm, Gerald Galster wrote:
A 50-100 mailbox user server will run Dovecot CE just fine. Pro would be overkill. What is overkill? I always thought it had a bit more features and support.
For Pro 2.3, you need (at minimum) 7 Dovecot nodes + HA authentication
- HA storage + (minimum) 3 Cassandra nodes if using object storage. This
is per site; most of our customers require data center redundancy as well, so multiply as needed. And this is only email retrieval; this doesn't even begin to touch upon email transfer. Email high availability isn't cheap. (I would argue that if you truly need this sort of carrier-grade HA for 50 users, it makes much more sense to use email as-a-service than trying to do it yourself these days. Unless you have very specific reasons and a ton of cash.)
High availability currently is cheap with a small two server setup: You need 3 servers or virtual machines: dovecot (and maybe postfix) running on two of them and mysql galera on all three. This provides very affordable active/active geo-redundancy.
No offence, it's just a pity to see that feature disappering.
That's exactly how my own 3-node personal setup works. I shove all I can into mariadb with galera (dovecot auth, spamassassin, etc) across the 3 nodes. Dovecot replication keeps the 2 dovecot instances in sync, the 3rd node is the quorum node for galera.
This is is on 3 cheap VPS' in 3 locations around the US. Mesh VPN between them for the encrypted connectivity. It works, and it works well.
And now replication is going away ? A perfectly-well working feature is being removed ?? It's not as if it's a problematic one, nor would it interfere with anything if it remained ...
I only see a couple of routes forward, at least for me.
* Stay on the last dovecot release that supports replication.
* Switch away from dovecot and cobble something else together.
* Move to gmail <shudder>
The removal of replication feels very arbitrary.