[Dovecot] best practises for mail systems

[Jan-Frode Myklebust]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 11:59:47PM +1100, Костырев Александр Алексеевич wrote:
> 
> I'm more worried about right design of mailstorage.. should I use some cluster fs with all mail of all users
> or should I split mailstorage across servers and somehow avoid long downtime if one of servers goes down.

A clusterfs gives you active/active high availability and balanced
distribution of users over your servers, at the cost of somewhat
degraded I/O performance all the time. If a single node will be able
to serve your load, I think it's much more sensible to create a
passive/standby availability solution based on a local filesystem (XFS).

If you need to split your mailstorage across servers, you can do
active/standby server pairs -- but then it gets difficult to balance
your users over your servers, and you *might* want to cheat and use a
clusterfs instead..


  -jf