OT: Run MScanner in a virtualized environment.

[Rich West]

Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> Arjan Schrijver wrote:
>> Anthony Cartmell wrote:
>>>> Hi guys, i know that it's not recomendable to run MS on virtualized HW
>>>> because of it's high cpu/io load. However, i'm doing some research
>>>> because my boss required it.
>>>
>>> I have it running on a high-powered Xen VPS (with 2G RAM available 
>>> and eight processor cores shared between the VPS instances) and it 
>>> works fine. Only processing ~800 messages per day so probably not a 
>>> very useful test though. I'll be moving more mail through it soon, 
>>> so might get to see how well it works then. My other server, non VPS 
>>> but with the same memory but only twin processors, manages 10,000 
>>> messages per day without much problem.
>>>
>> Running OpenVZ here (no performance impact), on 4 virtual MailScanner 
>> servers. They each process about 40.000 messages a day, through both 
>> SpamAssassin and ClamAV. The hardware consists of four servers with 
>> 4x2GHz cores and 2GB RAM. Each server runs one container. The 
>> performance is exactly the same as when the same servers were running 
>> MailScanner natively (not virtualized).
>> But this is of course only possible with OpenVZ or Virtuozzo, because 
>> it doesn't virtualize the complete hardware but only the kernel.
>
> I also use OpenVZ, about 40 000 emails/day on that gateway, about 800 
> 000 smtp connects/day (using BarricadeMX).
>
> The server is a quad core xeon, and runs this MailScanner system and 
> an asterisk PBX.
>
> Ugo

We're running MailScanner + Spamassassin + Clamd + milter-greylist under 
VMware ESX on an IBM BladeCenter.  We're only averaging about 4-6k 
messages per day, and the CPU / memory utilization never creeps up too 
high.  I'd say it's averaged around 1.3GB of memory and minimal CPU usage.

And it runs just fine. :)

-Rich