Zimbra

Artturi · #1 (**permalink**) 01-17-2007, 07:00 AM

Hello,

I'm actually running a mail server based on cyrus imap, postfix,..
I store cyrus' spools on a iscsi network storage (overland reo 9000).
Apart from postfix queues, this helps me store the essential data away from the server, on a large partition.

If I had to migrate to zimbra, I wonder what the best option would be :
- mount the network partition as /opt/zimbra and run everything from that
- only put the mailstore on the network partition

Do you have any advice or experience about that choice ?

Thanks in advance,

Artturi

LMStone · #2 (**permalink**) 01-17-2007, 07:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Artturi

Hello,

I'm actually running a mail server based on cyrus imap, postfix,..
I store cyrus' spools on a iscsi network storage (overland reo 9000).
Apart from postfix queues, this helps me store the essential data away from the server, on a large partition.

If I had to migrate to zimbra, I wonder what the best option would be :
- mount the network partition as /opt/zimbra and run everything from that
- only put the mailstore on the network partition

Do you have any advice or experience about that choice ?

Thanks in advance,

Artturi

Here's how we thought through the hardware end of things...

Amavis is very disk intensive, and Zimbra's config no longer puts the Amavis temp file on a RAM disk. Not sure you want to run this across iSCSI. Local storage, yes; fibre-channel SAN, yes; but iSCSI...

So, we built our Zimbra NE server on an HP DL360G4p with RAID1 U320 146GB 15K SCSI drives and put almost all of /opt/zimbra on the onboard disks.

We configured the box with a 6402 SCSI controller, bought a used dual bus Compaq SCSI3 JBOD (the predecessor to the MSA30) for about $125 on ebay, and filled the shelf up with 36GB SCSI3 disks in two ext3 RAID5 arrays (Used disks cost us about $50 each).

One controller on the JBOD (e.g. one RAID5 array) is connected to the Zimbra server. We mount this array as /backups. We then deleted the /opt/zimbra/backup directory and replaced it with a symbolic link pointing to /backups/zimbra_backups.

The Zimbra server does full backups every night and incremental backups every fifteen minutes, as we have clients who cannot lose any email if at all possible.

Connected to the other bus on the JBOD is another DL360 utility server. It runs an rsync job to copy the zimbra_backups directory from the RAID5 array on the first bus to the RAID5 array on the second bus. That utility server then also does a subsequent rsync to move the backups out of the data center to an offsite location.

Knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would have used a DL385, and created three RAID1 arrays with the six onboard U320 SCSI disks. One array for the OS and the Amavis temp files (2x36GB U320 15K), one array for Postfix/TomCat and the rest of Zimbra (2x72GB U320 15K), and one array for the Cyrus store and MySQL (2x300GB U320 15K)--and keep the same disk-to-disk-to-offsite backup strategy.

I'm sure others will have differing opinions!

All the best,
Mark