Slightly, maybe, offtopic.

[Rick Chadderdon]

I just virtualized my MailScanner setup and find it to be working just
as well as it did on a physical server.  Slightly better, actually.  The
base server is a single Xeon 3.0 GHz processor with 3G of RAM.  I'm
using the free VMWare Server and running two virtual machines on it. 
The MailScanner setup is running in FreeBSD and has been allocated 1.5G
of RAM.  It consists of Postfix, Cyrus, MySQL, MailScanner (using SA and
clamav, with bdc running in Linux emulation) and also includes an
Apache2 server feeding up Squirrelmail.  It is happily processing about
30,000 messages per day with a little under 1000 getting into user's
mailboxes.  The other virtual machine is a nameserver allocated 512M
(Ubuntu, PowerDNS, MySQL backend, authoritative for about 100 domains
and recursing for a dozen or so in-office users).  I have configured
VMWare to swap none of the virtual machines' RAM.

Both are running fine, both were a P2V done by restoring a backup to the
VM.  Both servers were less powerful boxes before the swap.  The
mailserver used to  be a 2.4GHz Celeron with 1.5G of RAM and the
nameserver was running on an ancient 500MHz P3 Dell server with 512M of
RAM.  The base server, if it's relevant, is Ubuntu Server 7.04, mostly
because I recently started playing with that OS and wanted to see how
well it worked in production.

The average batch time is about 8 seconds per message, but that's only
because my average batch is so small.  When I get a decent batch the
time goes down to about 4 seconds per message.

Neither machine was heavily loaded before virtualization, even though
the sheer amount of junk running on the mailserver might seem
excessive.  I plan on breaking things up a bit eventually, but when this
was originally set up I was quite short on servers.  :)  I'm really
liking the virtualization thing, but am acutely conscious of the entire
"if the base server goes down, we lose a bunch of services" issue.  It
makes one think about which VM's to combine on which servers quite
carefully.  But, the DR benefits are too great to ignore.

Rick


DAve wrote:
> We are investing in VMWare and some other technologies quickly. I
> understand or have seen mention of, others running MailScanner within
> VMWare. I am beginning to think that has great potential from a DR and
> multiple NOC point of view.
>
> Any pitfalls in running MailScanner in VMWare I should know about?
>
> Thanks,
>
> DAve
>