Original question:
>>I'm looking into a way to make sure mail is constantly available at our
>site. I read the archives and found where some were using various high
>availability software in conjuction with RAID units. My idea was using
>a product like Load Balancer by Unison. At the moment, we have a Sparc 10
>running SunOS 4.1.3 which is doing way more than it's fair share of work
>around here. We want to move mail to another system and have a second
>mail server to help split the load. We would like to minimize downtime
>and "balance" the load on the two servers. The mail is actually spooled
>on an NFS mount from an Auspex, so this helps in the ability to keep
>going in the event one of the servers fails, but we don't just want a
>"backup" server that just waits for the first to go down. We want them
>to split the load of mail processing evenly.
>
>Has anyone else tried something like this? Any better ideas? (Keeping
>a reasonable budget in mind) What are the feelings out there on the
>ability of Unison's Load Balancer? Are there other Load Balancing
>products out there? Load Balancer is the only one I've found.
Thanks to:
PARTHIV SHAH <parthiv@nscc.com>
"Jon Bidinger" <jonb@visi.com>
"F. David Sinn" <dsinn@psa.pencom.com>
bismark@alta.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Bismark Espinoza)
pdg@uow.edu.au (Peter Gray)
Doug Hall at the Univ. of Calgary, Alberta
Solutions:
1. Use DNS MX records to set up "Round Robin" MX serving. This was the one
that really caught my eye. We will be discussing the option before
going on to any Load Balancing software.
2. Use DNS and groupd (PD software) to get HA and load balancing. This one
is very interesting to me as well.
3. Other load balancing software/hardware: Cisco Local Director (hardware),
Checkpoint Firewall-1 (Firewall that also does load balancing),
Qmaster load balancing software.
Thanks for all the great input!
Martha Crocker
UNIX System Administrator
VLSI Technology, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas
(210)522-7468
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:01 CDT