Multi-Server Install

[willie44]

I was wondering if the Community Version could be used in a multiple server installation or will that only work on the Enterprise version.

thanks

[Valerion]

That is limited to the Enterprise Edition. Neither the Community nor Small Business versions support this.

[garba]

it's unclear to me what a multi-server install actually is... i mean, does a, say, "cross-host" install qualify as such? by cross-host i mean something like:

- ONE scalix server running on host A
- postgres package installed on host B
- webaccess package installed on host C
etc etc etc

would the community edition allow this kind of setup? if you can shed some light on this i'd be extremely thankful! regards, andrea

[Valerion]

In a multi-server environment you have multiple Scalix instances that share address books and send mail between servers, ie. multiple mail stores.

Simply moving SAC/SWA off of a machine and onto another won't qualify, I believe. I know the CE does support this, though you will have to do a custom installation. Generally you should avoid this, unless you have a good reason, from a management point of view.

[garba]

thanks for your quick reply, well yes we do have a valid reason for this since we already have a postgres instance running on a dedicated host, regards, andre

[SoftDux]

So, if I want to setup 2x Scalix community edition servers, each syncing the other one (The servers will be running samba & LDAP as well), to build a failover cluster, would that be a problem?

[florian]

Not really from a technical perspective, however, if the setup could be considered a failover cluster, you would not be legally licensed to do so as clustering is limited to enterprise edition.

Florian.

[SoftDux]

Ok, but what if I use heartbeat & rsync for the cluster? Other aspects of the server(s) which scalix has nothing todo with needs to be clustered as well. So even if I were to purchase scalix JUST FOR THIS PURPOSE, I would still need to setup my own cluster / failover. I only have 5 users, and will only use this for email, and really don't see why I should pay for the full version for my needs. Especially not if this is a test project

[florian]

That's correct - but it's a paper license thing. We do not provide the free community edition license for Scalix to be used in a clustered environment as HA clustering of email applications is typically considered to be used in larger or at least more demanding organisations and we decided early on not to provide our software for free for use in such environments.

This is the same as some vendors not allowing their free versions to be used in commercial environments, just for home use; note that *that* is not the case for Scalix, Community Edition may be used in commercial and business environments, just with the limitations as documented, and clustering is one of them.

Cheers,
Florian.

[SoftDux]

Ok, so you're saying that I'm going to be in breach of contact if I were to install Scalix on a failover cluster, even if I don't sync the mail?

[florian]

if the cluster uses shared storage so that both nodes can access the same data, hence providing failover ability and high availability, legally strictly speaking, that is correct.

Florian.

[SoftDux]

In this case, it doesn't.

My setup is as follows: 2x PIV 3.0Ghz Machines with 1GB RAM, 2x160GB HDD & 2x 10/100 NIC's each.

Each machine has it's own IP (and failover IP), & machine name. The only failover is that Heartbeat will "advertise" a common IP address for the two machines, and users will always connect to that IP ONLY.

So,

server01.localdomain -- 192.168.0.1
server02.localdomain -- 192.168.0.2
mainserver.localdomain -- 192.168.0.3

All clients will connect to 192.168.0.3. If one server goes down, heartbeat will switch over to the second server. Samba & OpenLDAP runs on both servers & will be synced to have the file share available at all times

[florian]

but how would you archieve failover with scalix without data being shared or replicated?

Florian.

[SoftDux]

It seem I'm not going to achieve that with scalix.

Expecting me to pay $3000 ($60 x 50 users min.) just to use it in a cheap failover environment is insane. I can understand your choices behind the price structure, but to limit something like failover only to large corporate clients is wrong. At that price I can continue to use MS Exchange and have no reason to bother changing.

Thanx for your clarification in this matter.

[florian]

Exchange would be much more expensive in such an environment. Not only would you require 2x the Exchange enterprise server license (>USD2K), but you would also need to run on top of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (to support the clustering) plus license a commercial clustering product. I believe based on list prices you would end up with about 4-5x that price, even before adding the CALs that you need.

Our pricing, especially for such advanced environments is highly competitive, if not cheap.

Cheers,
Florian.