[Dovecot] Multiple locations, 2 servers - planning questions...

[Charles Marcus]

On 2012-03-01 8:38 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
> Get yourself a qualified network architect.  Pay for a full network
> traffic analysis.  He'll attach sniffers at multiple points in your
> network to gather traffic/error/etc data.  Then you'll discuss the new
> office, which employees/types with move there, and you'll be able to
> know almost precisely the average and peak bandwidth needs over the MAN
> link.  He'll very likely tell you the same thing I have, that a single
> gigabit MAN link is plenty.  If you hire him to do the work, he'll
> program the proper QOS setup to match the traffic patterns gleaned from
> the sniffers.

Finally had time to properly review your answers here Stan.

The time you took for the in-depth reply is very much appreciated - and 
I'm sure you got a kick out of the level of my ignorance... ;)

As for hiring a network architect, I will absolutely be doing as you 
recommend (was already planning on it), but with the information I'm now 
armed with, at least I'll have a better chance of knowing if they know 
what they are doing/talking about...

I'm still planning for the two physical servers (one at each location), 
but you have convinced me that trying to run two live mail systems is an 
unnecessary and even unwanted level of complexity. The DC VM will still 
be hot (it is always best to have two DCs in a windows domain 
environment anyway) so I'll get automatic real time off site backup of 
all of the users data (since it will all be on DFS), but for the mail 
services, I'll just designate one as live, and one as the hot/standby 
that is kept in sync using dsync. This way I'll automatically get off 
site back up for each site for the users data stored in the DFS, and 
have a second mail system ready to go if something happens to the primary.

Again, thanks Stan... I am constantly amazed at the level of expertise 
and quality of advice available *for free* in the open source world, as 
is available on these lists.

-- 

Best regards,

Charles