[Dovecot] Hardware infrastructure for email system

[Wojciech Puchar]

>
> I'm currently (re-)planning my email setup and have been doing some research. 
> I have done some searches and read several threads in the areas of my 
> questions here. While there are some that come close I haven't yet been able 
> to get all my questions answered.
>
> I currently run a postfix, dovecot & roundcube setup and have about 2000 
> active accounts. I have a separate SMTP server for outbound mail and auth is 
> done against a separate LDAP server. In front of the POP/IMAP server I have 
> another SMTP (4 in parallel actually) server that receives and filters 
> inbound mail through a company specific, proprietary filter before the mail 
> hits the POP/IMAP server. LDAP & SMTP servers are ESXi VMs.


it is already enormous overshoot in hardware specs. And i do not really 
catch why you have "4 in parallel" servers.

And finally i cannot understand this dividing of servers just to merging 
it back using VMWare.

Finally i would recommend to get rid of RAID6. It's terribly slow on 
writes and writes are common on mail server.

Buy cheapest but largest SATA drive and use RAID1 (or RAID1+0) setup.