Re: [qmailtoaster] Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Casey Price ca...@smileglobal.com wrote: I'm curious to hear which hypervisors some of you guys are using for virtualizing QMT or just VMs in general. I played around with Citrix XenServer for a good 6-8 months last year, very very briefly checked out Hyper-V, and currently am running Xen on CentOS 5.7 on a few of my PowerEdge 2650's. I also briefly tried out VMware's free one...ESXi? From what I've been hearing, KVM is supposed to be the new up and coming standard. I haven't used it at all and don't know much about it, but I was hoping to get some recommendations from others on here. Someone mentioned Proxmox on here a few weeks back, so I downloaded Proxmox VE 1.9 and installed it on a server I just recently bought the other night. That's about as far as I've gotten with it at this point, so maybe someone can provide some insight? I've ran my toaster in a centos5 + xen combination and been quite happy with it. No stability or perfomance issuses whatsoever. Xen is not officially supported in rhel/centos version 6, but there is a 3rd party repository for the kernel/xen packages and those have been working with ok for my dom0 and web server domUs. As qmailtoaster does not support centos6 yet, I havent tried installing a toaster on centos6 domU though. I would be interested in trying out KVM, but for me it has seemed still a bit immature, so I went with 3rd party Xen. And as time resources are limited I don't want to waste time learning another technology as I have a working solution with Xen. Regards, Peter - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
Re: [qmailtoaster] Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
I use both Vsphere 4.1 and ESX1 4.0 One commercial qmail server , the second just for home use and testing builds. On 1/26/2012 2:12 AM, Peter Peltonen wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Casey Priceca...@smileglobal.com wrote: I'm curious to hear which hypervisors some of you guys are using for virtualizing QMT or just VMs in general. I played around with Citrix XenServer for a good 6-8 months last year, very very briefly checked out Hyper-V, and currently am running Xen on CentOS 5.7 on a few of my PowerEdge 2650's. I also briefly tried out VMware's free one...ESXi? From what I've been hearing, KVM is supposed to be the new up and coming standard. I haven't used it at all and don't know much about it, but I was hoping to get some recommendations from others on here. Someone mentioned Proxmox on here a few weeks back, so I downloaded Proxmox VE 1.9 and installed it on a server I just recently bought the other night. That's about as far as I've gotten with it at this point, so maybe someone can provide some insight? I've ran my toaster in a centos5 + xen combination and been quite happy with it. No stability or perfomance issuses whatsoever. Xen is not officially supported in rhel/centos version 6, but there is a 3rd party repository for the kernel/xen packages and those have been working with ok for my dom0 and web server domUs. As qmailtoaster does not support centos6 yet, I havent tried installing a toaster on centos6 domU though. I would be interested in trying out KVM, but for me it has seemed still a bit immature, so I went with 3rd party Xen. And as time resources are limited I don't want to waste time learning another technology as I have a working solution with Xen. Regards, Peter - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
Re: [qmailtoaster] Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/26/2012 01:12 AM, Peter Peltonen wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Casey Priceca...@smileglobal.com wrote: I'm curious to hear which hypervisors some of you guys are using for virtualizing QMT or just VMs in general. I played around with Citrix XenServer for a good 6-8 months last year, very very briefly checked out Hyper-V, and currently am running Xen on CentOS 5.7 on a few of my PowerEdge 2650's. I also briefly tried out VMware's free one...ESXi? From what I've been hearing, KVM is supposed to be the new up and coming standard. I haven't used it at all and don't know much about it, but I was hoping to get some recommendations from others on here. Someone mentioned Proxmox on here a few weeks back, so I downloaded Proxmox VE 1.9 and installed it on a server I just recently bought the other night. That's about as far as I've gotten with it at this point, so maybe someone can provide some insight? I've ran my toaster in a centos5 + xen combination and been quite happy with it. No stability or perfomance issuses whatsoever. Xen is not officially supported in rhel/centos version 6, but there is a 3rd party repository for the kernel/xen packages and those have been working with ok for my dom0 and web server domUs. As qmailtoaster does not support centos6 yet, I havent tried installing a toaster on centos6 domU though. I would be interested in trying out KVM, but for me it has seemed still a bit immature, so I went with 3rd party Xen. And as time resources are limited I don't want to waste time learning another technology as I have a working solution with Xen. Regards, Peter - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com Excuse the stupid question, but what's the advantage of VM over hardware? Are you running multiple instances of VM? Isn't there a performance loss over hard iron when running multiple instances? CJ -- Cecil Yother, Jr. cj cj's 2318 Clement Ave Alameda, CA 94501 tel 510.865.2787 http://yother.com Check out the new Volvo classified resource http://www.volvoclassified.com - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
Re: [qmailtoaster] Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/26/2012 01:12 AM, Peter Peltonen wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Casey Priceca...@smileglobal.com wrote: I'm curious to hear which hypervisors some of you guys are using for virtualizing QMT or just VMs in general. I played around with Citrix XenServer for a good 6-8 months last year, very very briefly checked out Hyper-V, and currently am running Xen on CentOS 5.7 on a few of my PowerEdge 2650's. I also briefly tried out VMware's free one...ESXi? From what I've been hearing, KVM is supposed to be the new up and coming standard. I haven't used it at all and don't know much about it, but I was hoping to get some recommendations from others on here. Someone mentioned Proxmox on here a few weeks back, so I downloaded Proxmox VE 1.9 and installed it on a server I just recently bought the other night. That's about as far as I've gotten with it at this point, so maybe someone can provide some insight? I've ran my toaster in a centos5 + xen combination and been quite happy with it. No stability or perfomance issuses whatsoever. Xen is not officially supported in rhel/centos version 6, but there is a 3rd party repository for the kernel/xen packages and those have been working with ok for my dom0 and web server domUs. As qmailtoaster does not support centos6 yet, I havent tried installing a toaster on centos6 domU though. I would be interested in trying out KVM, but for me it has seemed still a bit immature, so I went with 3rd party Xen. And as time resources are limited I don't want to waste time learning another technology as I have a working solution with Xen. Regards, Peter - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com Excuse the stupid question, but what's the advantage of VM over hardware? Are you running multiple instances of VM? Isn't there a performance loss over hard iron when running multiple instances? Nah, not stupid if you haven't had the need. VM allows one iron box server (Host) to run multiple instances of other servers (Guests) within it. Those guests can be anything from Windows, Linux, workstation, server, I think even MAC but not sure. The gain is where most time a hard box running something like mail or database might spend it's life at 10% load or less. Why waste the other 90%? Also, why have the duplicate hardware like drives, power supplies, etc. Just to help visualize, I'm running VSphere 4.1. I have 2 quad core dual xeon socket servers with 16G in each. For storage, there's a NAS box (Qnap) with 4Tb sharing out NFS shares. On those shares are the files for my VM guests. The 2 servers (hosts) reach into the NFS and run the guests much like you run instances of Word, Excell, etc. Within those 2 hosts, I have a total of I think 10 guests all running. Web servers, mail servers, database servers, etc. Very cool huh? As they say, you aint seen nothin' yet. Here's where the magic comes in... Since both hosts are same hardware and they are managed centrally, if one host drops dead, within seconds the other host picks up the dead hosts running guest servers. Just like clustering but for the whole server not just an application. Also, if one of the guests starts getting out of hand and eats up the hosts resources, other guests will migrate to the other host to give it room. All AUTOMAGICALLY!!
Re: [qmailtoaster] Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/25/2012 11:44 PM, Casey Price wrote: Hi all, I'm curious to hear which hypervisors some of you guys are using for virtualizing QMT or just VMs in general. I played around with Citrix XenServer for a good 6-8 months last year, very very briefly checked out Hyper-V, and currently am running Xen on CentOS 5.7 on a few of my PowerEdge 2650's. I also briefly tried out VMware's free one...ESXi? From what I've been hearing, KVM is supposed to be the new up and coming standard. I haven't used it at all and don't know much about it, but I was hoping to get some recommendations from others on here. Someone mentioned Proxmox on here a few weeks back, so I downloaded Proxmox VE 1.9 and installed it on a server I just recently bought the other night. That's about as far as I've gotten with it at this point, so maybe someone can provide some insight? I run my toasters as guests under VMware Server, soon to migrate to ESXi v4. After getting over initial configuration issues (mostly related to time sync configuration) I haven't had any problems. It's nice to be able to snapshot the system before applying major updates. If there's a problem, rolling back to a known good state is a single click. Haven't tried any other virtualization technologies yet. Brent Gardner - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
[qmailtoaster] Re: Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/26/2012 09:42 AM, Phil Leinhauser wrote: I missed addressing your question about performance. There can be a performance hit but for the most part, you can size your hardware to absorb that. Also, believe it or not, most servers live out their life never having broken a sweat. I just got done a battle with some high end developers on a job that insisted their application needed the biggest baddest hardware and no way could they work in a virtualized world. We spent 1/4 million for servers a few years ago for them. A few weeks ago one of the production servers died and was out of support. I moved them to VM after much arguing. To say the least, the lead developer was humbled. My hosts didn't even skip a beat. This touches on a wide spread misconception that servers are (or need to be) big iron high performance machines. This is far from the truth. My first QMT server for a small business was a PentiumII with 512M of ram. It barely broke a sweat. My present home server is a P4 (single core hyperthreaded) machine with 2G of ram. It runs VMware Server2 with 5 VM (guest) servers: firewall (IPCop), mail (QMT), web (nginx), backup (rsync) and storage (nfs, samba, netatalk). I'd run a myth backend on it as well if I could, but the USB tuner I tried didn't work with Server2. BL, it all runs quite nicely, and that's with an older CPU which has no virtualization support (thus cannot run some other virtual platforms). There is a performance hit with virtualization over bare iron, which varies considerably based on which resources are being used and how things are configured, but in any case I wouldn't expect more than a 20% hit (20% less than bare iron). The gains VMs provide in manageability are great though, and with some forms of virtualization (OpenVZ containers for instance) the performance hit is negligible. The question these days isn't so much a matter of having a reason to use virtualization as it is having a reason not to. -- -Eric 'shubes' - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
[qmailtoaster] Re: Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/26/2012 09:26 AM, Phil Leinhauser wrote: Since both hosts are same hardware and they are managed centrally, if one host drops dead, within seconds the other host picks up the dead hosts running guest servers. Just like clustering but for the whole server not just an application. Also, if one of the guests starts getting out of hand and eats up the hosts resources, other guests will migrate to the other host to give it room. All AUTOMAGICALLY!! Let's be honest, Phil. VMware with vMotion comes with a pretty hefty price tag. I think it would behoove us to keep things straight regarding which virtualization platforms are open source, which are free to use, and which are strictly commercial. Even then, ESXi for instance (free to use) can only run on limited pre-approved hardware, which also ups the price of use. Proxmox on the other hand is open source, it supports both KVM and OpenVZ (I'm not sure if it'll do Xen or not), and the upcoming release (in beta) also does clustering types of things that vMotion can do. I'm looking forward to seeing the wiki pages related to virtualization take shape as virtualization comes of age. I hope that anyone with experience in this area will contribute what they can share. I expect that QMT will find a home in whatever platforms are appropriate. Personally, I'm leaning towards KVM at this point (with or perhaps w/out Proxmox), as both Red Hat and Canonical have committed to that direction. FWIW, I was disappointed to learn that Proxmox does not support software raid, and have made installation of such a little more difficult than it would otherwise need to be. Software raid works perfectly well though, and I think the PM engineers have made a faux paux in this regard. -- -Eric 'shubes' - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
Re: [qmailtoaster] Re: Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/26/2012 09:26 AM, Phil Leinhauser wrote: Since both hosts are same hardware and they are managed centrally, if one host drops dead, within seconds the other host picks up the dead hosts running guest servers. Just like clustering but for the whole server not just an application. Also, if one of the guests starts getting out of hand and eats up the hosts resources, other guests will migrate to the other host to give it room. All AUTOMAGICALLY!! Let's be honest, Phil. VMware with vMotion comes with a pretty hefty price tag. I think it would behoove us to keep things straight regarding which virtualization platforms are open source, which are free to use, and which are strictly commercial. Even then, ESXi for instance (free to use) can only run on limited pre-approved hardware, which also ups the price of use. Proxmox on the other hand is open source, it supports both KVM and OpenVZ (I'm not sure if it'll do Xen or not), and the upcoming release (in beta) also does clustering types of things that vMotion can do. I'm looking forward to seeing the wiki pages related to virtualization take shape as virtualization comes of age. I hope that anyone with experience in this area will contribute what they can share. I expect that QMT will find a home in whatever platforms are appropriate. Personally, I'm leaning towards KVM at this point (with or perhaps w/out Proxmox), as both Red Hat and Canonical have committed to that direction. FWIW, I was disappointed to learn that Proxmox does not support software raid, and have made installation of such a little more difficult than it would otherwise need to be. Software raid works perfectly well though, and I think the PM engineers have made a faux paux in this regard. -- No argument Eric. Yes, a fully functional VSphere suite is very expensive. Like I said, it's the management tools that can make the difference though. I do think though if someone is looking for the pack leader barring price, VM is it. For the moment. I also would like to see some of the open source start to get to this level. It's getting there.
[qmailtoaster] Re: Sanesecurity, spamassassin spamdyke
On 01/25/2012 09:50 PM, Casey Price wrote: On another note...that link that Eric previously shared from Bill Schupp's site shows spamd running on a separate host with the spamc client running on the inbound boxes. How might one go about setting up something like this, and is it recommended? I believe the reason we had separated out the GW boxes from the SA boxes was because there were times that the GW boxes would get overloaded trying to process messages using spamassassin and we'd end up with a huge queue. So if I'm interpreting this correctly, if we made the SA1 box purely a spamassassin box (which it pretty much is now, but all the mail is being passed from GW1 via smtproutes) and then had spamc running on GW1, that would probably solved some of my problems don't you think? At least the ones I had been having from SaneSecurity and it sending bounces back to my GW box. Having spamd running on a separate host *might* be appropriate with 2 or more gateways, but not with just one. The main reason being that with a separate host, there's no potential performance gain due to i/o caching, which can be substantial. I would wait and see how the single box performs. The stock QMT isn't really tuned at all for major ISP type installations. With a little tuning, QMT can operate at peak capacity while not becoming overloaded. Tuning parameters such as the number of connections and spamc children can do wonders. You might also consider making the /var/qmail/simscan folder a tmpfs, but if the system has ample ram then linux i/o caching can achieve the same result. You can also consider compiling the spamassassin code, although I expect the gains from that aren't significant unless your host is CPU bound. We really need to do some work on documenting tuning best practices, and get this on the wiki. Would someone care to tackle this? In any case, I expect that a single host could handle your load. Besides which, what's so bad about deferring some connections occasionally? So the message sits in the sender's queue a little longer and the message doesn't arrive quite as quickly. I think this is reasonable to expect during peak times. As long as this happens just occasionally and not continually, I doubt your customers would even notice. Did I miss (or forget) it, or have you posted what your hardware is? ;) -- -Eric 'shubes' - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
[qmailtoaster] Re: Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 01/26/2012 10:56 AM, Phil Leinhauser wrote: I do think though if someone is looking for the pack leader barring price, VM is it. No doubt about that. They've been doing it the longest (I think), and doing it pretty well. I think the future of VirtualBox is questionable since Oracle has it now. VB is nice on the desktop, but their server implementations have always lagged (VB started with desktop virtualization, while VMware started with servers). I still use VMware Player on my desktop. Keep an eye on what RedHat and Canonical are coming up with in this arena though (both KVM based). I think they're both (rightfully) taking aim at VMware. I'd keep a close eye on those VMware shares. ;) -- -Eric 'shubes' - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
[qmailtoaster] Installing Qmailtoaster on Centos6
I am attempting to install Qmailtoaster in a Centos6 32 bit environment. I am using the scripts downloaded from the Qmailtoaster website which I realise were written to be run in a Centos5 environment. Compilation went smoothly until I reached qmail-toaster. I received the following failed build dependencies: Vpopmail-toaster Libdomainkeys-toaster Libsrs2-toaster Why I am receiving these failed dependencies when the above 3 modules where compiled prior to qmail-toaster without error? I am also receiving the following message: File not found by glob: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/qmail-pop3d*.rpm I am unable to find the .src module for the above module which would indicate why the .rpm could not be found. Are there any workarounds for the above errors or would it be simpler to install CENTOS5? David Anderson
Re: [qmailtoaster] Installing Qmailtoaster on Centos6
Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 11:42 PM, David Anderson da...@andersond.net wrote: I am attempting to install Qmailtoaster in a Centos6 32 bit environment. I am using the scripts downloaded from the Qmailtoaster website which I realise were written to be run in a Centos5 environment. CentOS6 is not supported, CentOS5 is. If you want to keep it simple, install on C5. But if you feel adventurous, search the list archives, I remember there being some posts about people trying to get their toaster working with C6. And if you get it running, please report here and add your installation notes in the Wiki! Best, Peter - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
[qmailtoaster] Re: Installing Qmailtoaster on Centos6
On 01/26/2012 02:54 PM, Peter Peltonen wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 11:42 PM, David Andersonda...@andersond.net wrote: I am attempting to install Qmailtoaster in a Centos6 32 bit environment. I am using the scripts downloaded from the Qmailtoaster website which I realise were written to be run in a Centos5 environment. CentOS6 is not supported, CentOS5 is. If you want to keep it simple, install on C5. But if you feel adventurous, search the list archives, I remember there being some posts about people trying to get their toaster working with C6. And if you get it running, please report here and add your installation notes in the Wiki! Best, Peter - Welcome to the community, David. By all means you're welcome to give it a try, but it won't work entirely until some PHP fixing is done. As Peter says, check the list archives for details. CentOS5 has a long life yet, and should do fine. It's quite solid. FWIW, the error message you've seen are because dependent packages must be built *and installed* prior to building subsequent packages. Also, qmail-pop3 is a separate binary rpm that's built as part of the qmail-toaster package. That source rpm produces 2 binary rpms. If you decide to go with COS5, I'd recommend installing the qmailtoaster-plus package first, then use qtp-newmodel to build and install the packages. It's pretty simple that way. -- -Eric 'shubes' - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
Re: [qmailtoaster] Re: Sanesecurity, spamassassin spamdyke
Casey Price Smile Global Technical Support Submit or check trouble tickets http://billing.smileglobal.com www.smileglobal.com http://www.smileglobal.com Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/#%21/SmileInternet Find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/smileglobal On 1/26/12 10:06 AM, Eric Shubert wrote: On 01/25/2012 09:50 PM, Casey Price wrote: On another note...that link that Eric previously shared from Bill Schupp's site shows spamd running on a separate host with the spamc client running on the inbound boxes. How might one go about setting up something like this, and is it recommended? I believe the reason we had separated out the GW boxes from the SA boxes was because there were times that the GW boxes would get overloaded trying to process messages using spamassassin and we'd end up with a huge queue. So if I'm interpreting this correctly, if we made the SA1 box purely a spamassassin box (which it pretty much is now, but all the mail is being passed from GW1 via smtproutes) and then had spamc running on GW1, that would probably solved some of my problems don't you think? At least the ones I had been having from SaneSecurity and it sending bounces back to my GW box. Having spamd running on a separate host *might* be appropriate with 2 or more gateways, but not with just one. The main reason being that with a separate host, there's no potential performance gain due to i/o caching, which can be substantial. Well, I have 3 different gateways and two SA boxes. Gateway2 is a QMT xen guest running on a Dell PowerEdge 2650. (I believe this machine has 4 or 5G of RAM with dual Xeon 2.6 or 2.8GHz processors). Gateway3 is a VPS I am leasing from ThrustVPS (damnVPS). Nothing spectacular...but it does the job. I will have to double check on GW1. I know that one of the SA boxes should definitely replace it, because they are more powerful machine. I would wait and see how the single box performs. The stock QMT isn't really tuned at all for major ISP type installations. With a little tuning, QMT can operate at peak capacity while not becoming overloaded. Tuning parameters such as the number of connections and spamc children can do wonders. You might also consider making the /var/qmail/simscan folder a tmpfs, but if the system has ample ram then linux i/o caching can achieve the same result. You can also consider compiling the spamassassin code, although I expect the gains from that aren't significant unless your host is CPU bound. We really need to do some work on documenting tuning best practices, and get this on the wiki. Would someone care to tackle this? In any case, I expect that a single host could handle your load. Besides which, what's so bad about deferring some connections occasionally? So the message sits in the sender's queue a little longer and the message doesn't arrive quite as quickly. I think this is reasonable to expect during peak times. As long as this happens just occasionally and not continually, I doubt your customers would even notice. Did I miss (or forget) it, or have you posted what your hardware is? ;)
[qmailtoaster] Re: Sanesecurity, spamassassin spamdyke
On 01/26/2012 06:34 PM, Casey Price wrote: Well, I have 3 different gateways and two SA boxes. Gateway2 is a QMT xen guest running on a Dell PowerEdge 2650. (I believe this machine has 4 or 5G of RAM with dual Xeon 2.6 or 2.8GHz processors). Gateway3 is a VPS I am leasing from ThrustVPS (damnVPS). Nothing spectacular...but it does the job. I will have to double check on GW1. I know that one of the SA boxes should definitely replace it, because they are more powerful machine. Are there any other guests running along side of GW2? I should think you could get rid of GW3 eventually. What are the specs on the SA boxes? The challenge as I see it will be getting from where you're at to where you want to be with little to no disruption. Do you have domains spread across all 3 GWs presently, or is there some redundancy? Likewise for the SA boxes? It might be simpler to drop off a gateway entirely and put an SA box on the edge, rather than trying to put SA functionality into a GW. Especially if you're going to end up with things on the present SA hosts anyhow. Do you have anything else virtual besides GW1? -- -Eric 'shubes' - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com
Re: [qmailtoaster] Hypervisor recommendations for virtualizing QMT
On 1/26/12 1:12 AM, Peter Peltonen wrote: Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Casey Priceca...@smileglobal.com wrote: I'm curious to hear which hypervisors some of you guys are using for virtualizing QMT or just VMs in general. I played around with Citrix XenServer for a good 6-8 months last year, very very briefly checked out Hyper-V, and currently am running Xen on CentOS 5.7 on a few of my PowerEdge 2650's. I also briefly tried out VMware's free one...ESXi? From what I've been hearing, KVM is supposed to be the new up and coming standard. I haven't used it at all and don't know much about it, but I was hoping to get some recommendations from others on here. Someone mentioned Proxmox on here a few weeks back, so I downloaded Proxmox VE 1.9 and installed it on a server I just recently bought the other night. That's about as far as I've gotten with it at this point, so maybe someone can provide some insight? I've ran my toaster in a centos5 + xen combination and been quite happy with it. No stability or perfomance issuses whatsoever. Xen is not officially supported in rhel/centos version 6, but there is a 3rd party repository for the kernel/xen packages and those have been working with ok for my dom0 and web server domUs. As qmailtoaster does not support centos6 yet, I havent tried installing a toaster on centos6 domU though. That is a good point Peter...Xen is working great on the systems I'm currently using it on at the moment. Even Amazon is using Xen for their EC2. The one thing I really want is some type of snapshot or backup system for Xen that would allow me to backup guests while they are running. Also, some form of migration capabilities...maybe not quite as far as vMotion (although I wouldn't complain if it were free...but it is way out of my price range). I would be interested in trying out KVM, but for me it has seemed still a bit immature, so I went with 3rd party Xen. And as time resources are limited I don't want to waste time learning another technology as I have a working solution with Xen. I'm curious about KVM as well, and will probably test with it a little bit and see what I think. I don't really get why RedHat decided to stop supporting xen. Does anyone have anything to say about RHEV or oVirt? Is there any type of CentOS-based RHEV? What type of virtualization is VMware doing with ESX? Is it KVM, Xen, or something else? Anyone try using Cloudmin to manage your virtual servers? Regards, Peter - Qmailtoaster is sponsored by Vickers Consulting Group (www.vickersconsulting.com) Vickers Consulting Group offers Qmailtoaster support and installations. If you need professional help with your setup, contact them today! - Please visit qmailtoaster.com for the latest news, updates, and packages. To unsubscribe, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-unsubscr...@qmailtoaster.com For additional commands, e-mail: qmailtoaster-list-h...@qmailtoaster.com Casey Price Smile Global Technical Support Submit or check trouble tickets http://billing.smileglobal.com www.smileglobal.com http://www.smileglobal.com Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/#%21/SmileInternet Find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/smileglobal
Re: [qmailtoaster] Re: Sanesecurity, spamassassin spamdyke
Casey Price Smile Global Technical Support Submit or check trouble tickets http://billing.smileglobal.com www.smileglobal.com http://www.smileglobal.com Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/#%21/SmileInternet Find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/smileglobal On 1/26/12 6:31 PM, Eric Shubert wrote: On 01/26/2012 06:34 PM, Casey Price wrote: Well, I have 3 different gateways and two SA boxes. Gateway2 is a QMT xen guest running on a Dell PowerEdge 2650. (I believe this machine has 4 or 5G of RAM with dual Xeon 2.6 or 2.8GHz processors). Gateway3 is a VPS I am leasing from ThrustVPS (damnVPS). Nothing spectacular...but it does the job. I will have to double check on GW1. I know that one of the SA boxes should definitely replace it, because they are more powerful machine. Are there any other guests running along side of GW2? I'm running one other guest, which is a front-end QMT host that belongs to my QMT Cluster - basically the QMT ISP Array setup that Jake documented in his videos. So this front-end host is mounting the mailstore and QMT files over an NFS share, and then running Dovecot, Roundcube, and Squirrelmail. At the moment there are only 3 domains on the Cluster, and I'm still in the process of testing things. The long and the short of it, is...the only real load on the host which runs GW2 is the GW2 guest. I should think you could get rid of GW3 eventually. Yeah, that will probably happen in the not-so-distant future. The only reason I've kept it up, is for redundancy and since it is at a geographically different location than the other two GW's. What are the specs on the SA boxes? SA1 - Dell PowerEdge 2650: Dual Xeon 3.4GHz 64bit processors, 4GB RAM, 1x 73GB hdd (I need to add another and setup a RAID1) SA2 - Dell E-521: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ processor, 4GB RAM, 1x 80GB hdd (I'd like to add another and mirror this one as well) The challenge as I see it will be getting from where you're at to where you want to be with little to no disruption. Do you have domains spread across all 3 GWs presently, or is there some redundancy? Likewise for the SA boxes? GW1-3 are all configured as closely as possible. They contain all the same domains. The main differences are that GW1 is setup to pass all mail to SA1 using smtproutes, while GW2 3 are passing mail to SA2. It might be simpler to drop off a gateway entirely and put an SA box on the edge, rather than trying to put SA functionality into a GW. Especially if you're going to end up with things on the present SA hosts anyhow. Do you have anything else virtual besides GW1? The only other things I've virtualized are my virtualmin webserver, and a couple of XMX servers which are legacy boxes from when I took over the company, and are simply CentOS installs with Sendmail configured for high volume outbound mail.
