Placing ALL user account data on external storage?

[danfluidmind]

I'd like to have ALL files that contain any data related to user accounts (mail/calendar/address books, etc) stored on either a separate drive or separate server, so that if I were be in a situation where I needed to completely reinstall the operating system that Zimbra was running on and re-install Zimbra--or just move to a completely different server--all I would have to do is point it to my external storage and be up and running again.

My first question is, which directories to I need to put on the external storage in order to have this situation? As far as I can tell, the following directories are essential:

/opt/zimbra/backup
/opt/zimbra/db
/opt/zimbra/index
/opt/zimbra/store

If I were to completely reinstall Zimbra and the OS it's running on, are there any other directories that contain data that would be lost?

Second, is it feasible to put the storage on a separate server using NFS? Are there performance concerns? Is NFS the most common method for this?

Thanks
--Dan

[phoenix]

Why don't you just put the /opt/zimbra directories an a RAID10?

[danfluidmind]

Originally Posted by phoenix

Why don't you just put the /opt/zimbra directories an a RAID10?

Because I'd like the user data to be separate from the Zimbra application. If I need to completely reinstall the Zimbra application, I'd like to be able to just re-point those directories to my external storage and be up and running. Maybe Zimbra wasn't designed with that kind of separation in mind and it's not possible, I don't know. That's why I'm asking :-)

--Dan

[reza225]

hey Dan, i do what you're talking about for my backup directory via NFS. I'd use NFSv3 to make sure you don't run into file locking issues.

[kirme3]

you're going to want /opt/zimbra/redolog also

And possibly /opt/zimbra/conf