How to Change Mail Box Storage on Mount Folder

[farrukhndm]

I have Small SAN Dlink DNS-323 with 1Tb Raid 1.Now i want to as a Mail box storage as i have installed Zimbra on PowerEdge 1700 with 72x3 Hard Drive on ESXI server.

Please guide,1)which is the mail storage directory where all mail boxes are stored in zimbra
2)how to change the Locate Storage with remote stoage. eg i have mount a remote folder in

/opt/zimbra/SAN_mounted_Storage

so where i change the Storage folder in Zimbra or

I have to mount the SAN_mounted_storage as /opt/zimbra/store ??

please guide both methods.

3)will it affect in performance of accessing emails?

Please guide me . thanks.

[thorng]

Dlink DNS-323 is not SAN, it’s a cheap NAS box. You are mounting it via NFS. Not recommended. Not to mention these NAS is totally unreliable. You will have to reboot that box from time to time for no apparent reason at all. You will be better off getting a SCSI card and an external SCSI disk enclosure for your PowerEdge 1700.
What is the reason for ESXI? It not like the PowerEdge 1700 will be over powered for an Zimbra Server.

[siomon.liu]

yes


/opt/zimbra/store

Account mailbox database structure - Zimbra :: Wiki

[farrukhndm]

Originally Posted by thorng

Dlink DNS-323 is not SAN, it’s a cheap NAS box. You are mounting it via NFS. Not recommended. Not to mention these NAS is totally unreliable. You will have to reboot that box from time to time for no apparent reason at all. You will be better off getting a SCSI card and an external SCSI disk enclosure for your PowerEdge 1700.
What is the reason for ESXI? It not like the PowerEdge 1700 will be over powered for an Zimbra Server.

I am Using the ESXi for Virtualization.For storage option you have rejected DNS-323.Thats very good advice i also agree with you its not reliable.
Will i add the NFS Shares on Software Raids as a DataStore in ESXi and Store My /opt/zimbra/store is this NFS Share.??

what will be the performance of PowerEdge Installed ESXI with 4 GB RAM with 5000 Mail Boxes 2TB NFS Storage on Software Raid-1.

thanks & waiting.

[thorng]

If your PowerEdge 1700 Model number is correct, the system is about two generation old and does not support Hardware virtualization. that means you will get about 30% hit on the VM perform. PowerEdge 1700 (1750?) Raw Metal would be just fine for Zimbra Server. Don't virtualize for the sak of virtualize. Direct Attached storage can be flexible too, search the forums for putting the file system on LVM partition. NFS is not recommended for Zimbra at all (mainly due to the MySQL and LDAP Database) see Performance_Tuning_Guidelines.
If you want a virtualized storage environment, you will need the infrastructure to support it. A true SAN over FC or at least an storage system with iSCSI support over Gigabit networks.

But by the number of the mailbox and storage, I would go with bigger 64-bit systems and multiple servers.

[farrukhndm]

thanks thorng for suggesting .
Ya i have PowerEdge 1750 not 1700.As i have see in that article that NFS is not recommended for BDB, OpenLDAP, MySQL, Lucene.we decided getting a SCSI card and an external SCSI disk enclosure.

One thing Unconcern to Zimbra Deployment .If NFS is Unreliable why ESXI support NFS data Storage?

[thorng]

NFS is not unreliable. It's the database components not designed to utilize NFS and you will get performance penalty as well as stability issues running database on a NFS mount. ESXI can actually hide the NFS factor if you put the disk image on the NFS mount and present the disk to VM as locally attached disks. This will remove the stability issue but the performance penalty will be even greater.

ESXI designed are for generalized purpose and there are many situations where NFS mount will work perfectly.

P.S. I believe 1750 have a external SCSI interface on board already.