[Dovecot] Hardware infrastructure for email system

[Patrick Domack]

Quoting Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net>:

> Am 23.06.2012 13:09, schrieb Wojciech Puchar:
>> 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.
>
> because it is a big difference if you have anything in a single
> machine or splittet in virtual machines - you can move them at
> runtime to different hosts and if you run out of ressources
> for one of them you can buy a phyisclal machine, add it to the
> cluster and move the virtual machine without any downtime
>
> if you have all on one machine or VM you are not scaleable

Personally I found going from real hardware E51xx servers to E56xx  
servers to give double the performance per same speed and amount of  
cores for my mail server. Then moving it onto vmware slowed it down  
approx 15%.

Overall still a let win, and using vmware for extra HA and easier  
maintenance is deferentially worth the slowdown.