Mail on SSD?

[gunderwood]

I'm thinking about setting up an ESXi host and giving the Ubuntu/Zimbra VM an raw device mapping for one or two SSDs. In the case of two SSDs, I'd configure Ubuntu to do software RAID 1. The actual VM will be on a different drive, but I'd like to keep all the heavy I/O on the SSDs. Has anyone done something similar? Does Zimbra really need that many I/O's? Thoughts?

I do realize that the choice of SSD is important considering the database transactions/random performance. I also realize it depends on how many users would be on this system. For the moment I'm expecting < 100 and probably more like 25 for the immediate future.

My original idea was to use FreeNAS on a RAID 10 array, but given the poor iscsi performance of FN and Zimbra's NFS support that looks to be a sub-par solution.

[Klug]

How many users and mails (per second) do you intend to host on this?
I mean, to have a reason for choosing SSD vs SAS drives (or even NearLine)?

What I mean is I'm not sure SSD is needed (at all) 8)

On a side note, what kind of performance issues are you having with FreeNAS and iSCSI?

[dhape]

Interesting article about Considering an SSD? Read this