LARGE single-system Cyrus installs?

[Blake Hudson]

Bron Gondwana wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 10:18:04AM -0800, Vincent Fox wrote:
>   
>> Our latest line of investigation goes back to the Fastmail suggestion, 
>> simply
>> have multiple Cyrus binary instances on a system.  Each running it's own
>> config and with it's own ZFS filesystems out of the pool to use.
>> Since we can bring up a virtual interface for each instance we won't even
>> have to bother with using separate port numbers, etc.
>>     
>
> Also virtual interfaces means you can move an instance without having
> to tell anyone else about it (but it sounds like you're going with an
> "all eggs in one basket" approach anyway)
>
> Bron.
> ----
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>   
The Solaris' zones feature has been mentioned a few times w/ regard to
large cyrus installs. Has anybody tried running Cyrus under Xen
virtualization in linux to achieve similar goals... whether in
production, on a single system, or to simulate a murder or other
environment?

I'd be interested in a way to accommodate ~100,000 users under one
domain (with the scalability to at least double in size). With little
experience with Murder, I am favoring a perdition/nginx setup using
multiple backends, each @ ~ 10k users. This seems the most straight
forward to me as I can easily use simple algorithms compatible with
postfix/perdition/cyrus/my brain to create mailboxes and route
mail/connections to an appropriate backend cyrus server and I can easily
see the design scaling past 200,000 users.

However, if I can use virtualization to increase capacity/reduce costs
it would certainly be a worthwhile endeavor to test.

-B