Anyone using Linux LVM with cyrus?

[Fabian Fagerholm]

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 20:08, Ben Poliakoff wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We're preparing to roll out a new cyrus mail system which will handle
> the bulk of our 1700 users' email.  The server platform will be redhat
> linux 7.3 or 8.0.  
> 
> We'd like to use the Linux LVM (at the very least for the mail store
> itself) so that we can back up the system off of read only snapshots
> (courtesy of LVM).
> 
> Has anyone out there used LVM with cyrus imap in an environment as
> large or larger than 1700 users?  If so we'd love to hear about any
> lessons learned (i.e. "Don't do it!") or gotchas...

We decided to use EVMS instead of LVM for one customer's system, because
in our opinion, it is more flexible, easy to use for administrators
(mainly due to its GUI) and it proved to be a very reliable piece of
software (by which I do not imply that LVM isn't). The tools are well
designed, consistent, and they do what you expect them to do. There's a
GUI, an ncurses-based interface, and a command line tool that is very
well suited to scripting.

We have an automatic 7-day rotating snapshot system and have already
saved some important mails that were accidentally deleted by careless
users (would you believe that in Outlook Express you can irreversibly
delete a folder with its contents without even seeing a confirmation
dialog?). We also have virus scanning and spam filtering in the same
box. The hardware is a 1GHz PIII, 512MB of RAM and two 40GB IDE disks in
a RAID-1 mirror as data store. The mailstore and snapshots are on the
same disks -- thus the snapshots are also RAIDed. We use ext3 as file
system, although we are looking very closely at the other journaling
filesystems available for Linux at the moment.

The user base of this customer is not as large as yours, though, but
given this experience we're definately going to move our other customers
to this setup as well. I'd say with appropriate hardware to back it up,
EVMS would definately by up to the task.

Cheers,
-- 
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe at paniq.net>
paniq.net