Scalix in SAN environment

[adhodgson]

Hi,

Is anyone else using a SAN to host /var/opt/scalix? We are looking into using SAN technology for other applications, and before we go down the road of using Scalix I am wondering whether it is possible to use a SAN to store the Scalix data, then have a backup machine which can reference the data on the SAN if the primary machine goes down (I don't mind if this is a manual switch over).

I would be interested to see what other people are doing here.

Thanks.
Andrew.

[Valerion]

If you are a Scalix EE customer, talk to Scalix Support or your reseller, they can give you some documentation on getting this to work properly, using a Active-Passive failover setup.

If you want to experiment, you need to mount your volume from your SAN as a block device and not a NFS mountpoint. Scalix needs to be able to do full locking on the files.

[adhodgson]

Hi,

Yes, we were going to be using a block device using fibre,, and a card in the server which will go to the SAN. We would then use a LVM volume with a mount for /var/opt/scalix.

Thanks.
Andrew.

[jaga0]

adhodgson:
Take a good deal of time and verify your array choices with scalix support. I have mine attached to an external san array of 5 146g disks in a raid 5 with a signifigant write cache but I feel that reads are too slow. Outlook seems sluggish to load folders with more than 10,000 items and support suggests a raid 10 config. I do not believe my disks are the cause of the issue, but who knows.

[adhodgson]

Hi.

My original config was going to be:

2 76gb disks in RAID1 for OS
4 300GB disks in RAID10 for /var/opt/scalix

As we are thinking of SAN I wanted to put this on RAID10 on the SAN. I hate RAID5 forr databases/email servers.

Thanks.
Andrew.

[dkelly]

As we are thinking of SAN I wanted to put this on RAID10 on the SAN. I hate RAID5 forr databases/email servers.

When customers have reported *really* poor performance with Scalix, we have determined that they are all running with RAID5.

All have seen significant improvement when switching to RAID 1+0 with one customer calling a "day vs night" comparison

Your mileage may vary but Scalix's best practice recommendation is to use RAID 1+0

Cheers

Dave