We are expecting a new server to arrive tomorrow and will have VMWare ESX5. The physical box is rather powerful and we are planning on having three virtual servers running on it (listed below). Since we need to start this process now to help with the high load we are seeing, we are going to use Ubuntu 10 since you support it and the other is not officially released. We can start with 10 on the scanning computer if you feel it would be better to wait a week or two for v12 on the other servers.
PHYSICAL HARDWARE Dual Xeon 6 Core Processors, 30 GB RAM, 7 - 15,000 RPM (300GB ea; 800GB Total storage) RAID 10 with hot swap spare.
VIRTUAL MACHINES 1 - Postfix Email Server 1 - Spamassassin/Clamav Server (not sure if Postgrey should be on it too) 1 - Primary server for LAMP running Virtualmin
Here are the questions:
1) Can we have the Primary server manage the email server with a central copy of Virtualmin to make it simpler to add virtual servers and email on the email server? If yes, can you point me to the doc?
2) Since we do not want to over allocate storage on the Spam/AV scanning server, how much storage do you think would be reasonable for handling about 150,000 emails a day?
3) Do you have a recommendation for performance and setup for the primary and email server?
I know some of this may be more in the realm of the Canonical arena, but since we leverage Virtualmin, we want to make sure we follow your specifications.
Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Thu, 04/26/2012 - 08:16 Comment #1
Howdy --
Can we have the Primary server manage the email server with a central copy of Virtualmin to make it simpler to add virtual servers and email on the email server? If yes, can you point me to the doc?
Well, can you explain how you were thinking of using your remote scanning server?
Normally, it wouldn't even need Virtualmin on it, as it purely does scanning of any incoming email.
That is, SpamAssassin sits there waiting for another server to hand it an email to scan. It performs that scan, and returns a result.
Since we do not want to over allocate storage on the Spam/AV scanning server, how much storage do you think would be reasonable for handling about 150,000 emails a day?
A dedicated SpamAssassin/ClamAV scanning server doesn't store email. I'm not even sure that the emails being scanned touch the disk, they may stay in RAM the entire time.
It's possible they could be temporarily stored, in a tmp dir somewhere, during the scanning process.
So if you allow for plenty of room for your OS, and maybe a few gigs of breathing room, that should be plenty if your server will only be acting as a SpamAssassin/ClamAV scanning system.
Do you have a recommendation for performance and setup for the primary and email server?
Well, you're already doing a lot of the things we'd normally recommend.
That said, if you continue to have problems, and are stuck as to what to do -- I've heard rumors (which I have not yet tested myself) that the 3.2 kernel included with Ubuntu 12.04 which just came out today has made significant improvements in being responsive when under load.
That's not the sort of thing I'd recommend upgrading your server for to test -- moving your server to a new distribution is a big deal. But you could do some testing to see if it makes a difference, and if it does, you could always try moving to it after it's supported by Virtualmin within a few weeks.
Submitted by rjrsinc on Thu, 04/26/2012 - 08:30 Pro Licensee Comment #2
So, as you stated, Vmin does not need to be installed on the Spam?AV scanning server and we'll configure it tomorrow for Ubuntu 12.04. As long as it's easy enough to switch the scanning back to the email server if there is a problem, I think we'll be fine.
We're hoping that allows enough headroom on the existing server to stave off the load issues we've been seeing until Vmin is ready for 12.04.
Regarding the first question, since we are planning on have these three servers (LAMP, Email, Spam/AV Scanning), I'd like a way to easily manage them. The Spam/AV server is really not part of the mix since it doesn't care about user accounts (I assume).
I'm really asking if there is a correct procedure to have the LMAP and Email server work together, so when we add a new Virtual Server in Vmin, it will automatically establish the email accounts on the email server. This would allow us to manage everything about that virtual server from the primary LAMP server running Vmin Pro.
Submitted by andreychek on Thu, 04/26/2012 - 08:47 Comment #3
Well, Virtualmin doesn't support having email accounts on a server that's different than the main Virtualmin server.
All you're doing with the remote scanning server is running two processes -- SpamAssassin and ClamAV.
There wouldn't be any additional accounts on that server, and that server doesn't act as your mail server.
All it does it perform scans for the email users on your primary server.
Submitted by rjrsinc on Thu, 04/26/2012 - 09:23 Pro Licensee Comment #4
Thank you. I think we have our game plan. Closing ticket, but opening another on a separate topic. I think I found our resource hog.