Need advice on building a Cyrus IMAP cluster

[Dave McMurtrie]

Michael Sims wrote:
> Hi Dave,
> 
> Dave McMurtrie wrote:
>> As of Cyrus 2.3, the code supports the notion of application-level
>> replication.  It's near real-time replication of all the application
>> data, but one copy of the data isn't live.  This is more of an
>> active/passive solution, since you have to do something to make cyrus
>> aware of the 2nd copy of the data if you suffer some type of failure
>> of
>> the first copy.
> 
> Quick question on this.  If I setup an active/passive cluster and put the
> mail spool AND all of the application data on a SAN that both nodes have
> access to (not simultaneously, of course), doesn't that bypass the need for
> using "mupdate_config: replicated"?  Thanks...

What you're proposing is to set up an active/passive cluster that will 
cover you in the event of server hardware failure, and that's fine.  You 
don't need to enable replication for this to work.

Doing data replication will help you if you suffer a catastrophic data 
loss, as well.  It's just a second copy of all your mail data, so think 
of it like an online backup.  We do replication in addition to backups 
right now simply because the path to recovery would be much faster.

Thanks,

Dave