Re: Load balancers and large deployments?

[Tom Golson <tgolson@tamu.edu>]

Hi Steve,
     Sure.  Do you have actual virtual servers and service pools for your individual mailstore servers, or do you just NAT them?  After setting up service pools for POP(S)/IMAP(S)/HTTP(S) for the three different service names I've been compelled to offer mail under, I took the easy way out and just NAT'd the individual mailstores.
     Thinking I was being clever at the time, but a little concerned now that it's confusing issues, the Zimbra mailbox service is installed on a virtual IP, not a server IP, and all of the mailbox information lives on our filers, so in theory I can easily swap mailstores services between servers.  Until I can figure out why zimlets just don't really work, though, I'm going to be suspicious of things that I'm sure are benign.  *sigh*

--Tom

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Hillman" <hillman@sfu.ca>
To: "Tom Golson" <tgolson@tamu.edu>
Cc: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 2:15:01 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re: Load balancers and large deployments?

We're doing load balancers as well (F5's), but only for the login page. Once you login, you get directed to "your" mailbox server, which still goes through the load balancer to act as a firewall, but not to do balancing.  SOAP requests for a given user must always be sent to that user's mailbox server, unless you have the HTTP proxy set up, which is introduced in 5.0.5 but is still beta as of 5.0.6

We only have a few hundred users on our system so far (ramping up next month), but we haven't had any reported Zimlet problems.

----- "Tom Golson" <tgolson@tamu.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> 	At Texas A&M, we're hosting about 70,000 mailboxes on a cluster of 
> machines that live behind a pair of F5 load balancers.  We see a
> little 
> bit of odd behavior, mainly with zimlets, that I suspect the F5's may
> be 
> contributing to, and was curious what others are using for load 
> balancers, or if you're using load balancers at all?
> 
> --
> Tom Golson
> Senior Lead Systems Engineer
> Opensystems Group
> Computing & Information Services
> Texas A&M University


-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University
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