[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana/ZFS mail server HA, config

[Gary Mills]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 08:34:44AM +0100, Hans J. Albertsson wrote:
> Actually, automatic failover will not be necessary, it is after all
> only a mail server in an environment with fairly resilient users.
> They'd be quite happy to have to call a sysadm up for manual failover.

How you design this depends on what components you expect to fail.

I have created an SMF service that does manual failover on a two-node
cluster.  It expects a zpool from an external storage device that can
be imported by either node.  In this case its a SAS array that's
connected to both nodes.  The SMF service imports or exports the zpool
and creates or deletes a logical IP interface.  It also adds
dependancies to other services that require these resources.  It is in
production on Solaris 10 for core services like DNS and NIS.

For an e-mail server only, you should consider Cyrus IMAP.  It has
built-in facilities to synchronize the message store and databases
between back-end servers at the application level.  In this case,
each node has its own separate storage devices.

-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-