Topic: Separate e-mail from ibays (HDD and SSD)

[Jáder]

Hi all
I'm thinking about a simpler upgrade on my production server: a PCIe card to hold 2x 960GB SSD NVMe

That would permit to move SO + IBAYS to SSE NVMe and let users portion (= e-mail !!) on HDD.
I think this would be just a question of different mounting points for /home/e-smith/files/ibays (SSD disk) and /home/e-smith/files/users  (HDD) .

Am I wrong ?

Another question: using same/similar server , what's crazy factor to do these:
a) install a single SATA SSD 128 GB to run ProxMox
b) install a PCIe card adapter with 2 SSD960 (see above)
c) install ProxMox on SATA and later create a VM SME10 and apply that separation (ibays vs users)

Ihave two HP servers : ML110 G5 and ML310 gen8 v2 ... I could start with old one (ML110g5) as Proxmox "node 2"  , copy all data to it, and later add ML310g8 and balance things between them!

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

main limits are your budget and imagination.
you can virtualize. most are doing that nowadays. 
also it is a good practice to separate system from user data with different disks when you start to have growing data. 

most just separate /home/e-smith/files from the system but you could separate ibays and users from each other and system.  pay attention however that shares, nextcloud and some other things end up in files and then would en on the system disk if you separate just ibays and users folder.  so plan the needed size.

[ReetP]

As JP says - it will depend a lot on your budget and hardware

Personally all my data stores are on an array - if the OS goes bang I still have access to the data.

For SME v10 raw you could do:

1 x disk for OS
2 x disks for Data - presume you are going to mirror them?

Needs the data part doing manually. See the fstab below.


Prox setup:

1 x disk for Prox
2x disk for Data

If you happen to use a hardware RAID card (which is what Prox expects you to do) you can then use a single disk for the OS and let the card build the array. You will still manually need format and mount it in Prox.

Mine is something like this in fstab - I formatted and added LVM to it and then mounted it.

Code: [Select]

/dev/vmdata/raid-lv /var/lib/vz1 ext4 defaults 0 1
If you need a soft RAID then install Prox to the single disk, then mount your two disks and create a soft RAID array. You need to decide if you want to use LVM/LVM thin etc etc.

Create the array format & mount it as above.

I use the OS disk (in reality on mine the OS is on a mirror) to store ISO images, test VMs etc etc and leave the main data store (RAID 6) for "real world" servers.

Yes, you could put the SME OS on the single disk and just the data on the data store but if that single disk goes you lose Prox and SME.

For the SME setup/upgrade.

I now have this virtualised on Prox as it was easier for the upgrade to SME v10. I just created a new small VM, installed SMEv10, manually backed up v9 with the migrate script, stopped v9, restored to v10 for the settings, and then bind mounted the ibays & users directory:

Code: [Select]

UUID=85d40fa6-8e7b-41b4-be8c-566813997c82 /mnt/vdb3 ext4 defaults 0 0
/mnt/vdb3/home/e-smith/files/ibays /home/e-smith/files/ibays ext4 bind,uquota,gquota,noatime 0 0
/mnt/vdb3/home/e-smith/files/users /home/e-smith/files/users ext4 bind,uquota,gquota,noatime 0 0

Hope that makes sense!!

I have two HP servers : ML110 G5 and ML310 gen8 v2 ... I could start with old one (ML110g5) as Proxmox "node 2"  , copy all data to it, and later add ML310g8 and balance things between them!

The G5 is probably too underpowered for much. You really need 4 Gb for v10 itself unless you disable Clamav etc.

Just sling a couple of big old cheap drives in it and use it as a backup store or similar