Feasibility of Red Hat Cluster Manager and LVM for Cyrus IMAP

[Raine, David]

Why did you choose to do HA for your MTA-IN/IMAP/POP
using clustering rather than load-balancing?

I'm curious, as I have been considering a HA solution, 
too.

Regards,
David.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sebastian Hagedorn [mailto:Hagedorn at uni-koeln.de]
> Sent: 27 August 2002 16:10
> To: info-cyrus
> Subject: Feasibility of Red Hat Cluster Manager and LVM for Cyrus IMAP
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> we're currently planning a big scale migration of our mail 
> system. At the 
> moment we use two different setups for students and for 
> staff, both running 
> sendmail and UW IMAP and POP.
> 
> We want to move to one system using sendmail and Cyrus 2.1.x. 
> There will be 
> about 50,000 users. The current plan is to use a cluster of 
> altogether four 
> Dell servers running Red Hat 7.3. The MTA-Out and some other 
> services will 
> be load balanced on two of the machines using LVS aka Piranha.
> 
> The MTA-In / IMAP / POP part will not be load-balanced, but 
> the idea is 
> rather to increase its availability. This we plan to achieve 
> by using the 
> Red Hat Cluster Manager as Failover Service. The two servers will be 
> physically connected to an external RAID box with two SCSI 
> controllers. 
> When one of them goes down the other one mounts the required 
> volumes off 
> the RAID box and starts the configured services.
> 
> Has anybody on the list ever done something like this?
> 
> Another question I have regards the partitions for the Cyrus 
> mailboxes. 
> Using the Linux logical volume manager (LVM) and XFS's 
> xfs grow command it 
> is possible to grow partitions while the machine is running 
> and they are 
> mounted. To me it seems easiest to use just one such 
> partition for the 
> mailboxes. Because the *physical* arrangement of the data can 
> be adjusted 
> at will using LVM this is very flexible. Are there any 
> downsides to this 
> approach that I'm overlooking? The bottleneck will be the UW-160 SCSI 
> controller, but I would think that that would be enough ...
> 
> All comments are welcome.
> 
> Thanks, Sebastian
> --
> Sebastian Hagedorn M.A. - RZKR-R1 (Flachbau), Zi. 18, 
> Robert-Koch-Str. 10
> Zentrum für angewandte Informatik - Universitätsweiter Service RRZK
> Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - Tel. +49-221-478-5587
> 

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