Feasibility of Red Hat Cluster Manager and LVM for Cyrus IMAP

[Sebastian Hagedorn]

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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