10VMs are a lot of nightly backup!
We use VMware ESXi 5 on an HP Proliant (24GB RAM, AMD Quad-Core, 1.2T)
with the following:
Windows Server 2008R2 RDC (every user connects with RDP)
Windows Server 2008R2 SQL (our accounting apps use MS-SQL)
SOGo ZEG (starting as Ubuntu 11.04 now 12.04 and latest 'sogo)
It sounds like you need to simplify your architecture (with only 10
accounts) (we have 8 accounts)
Converting the ZEG to an ISO would allow you to install it with more
disk space (to facilitate the shared accounts that require a large
amount of disk space) Maybe that's where the savings should come!
A large disk space requirement in a VM still requires a lot of resources
for backup.
It appears the size of the shared mailboxes precludes doing backups of
snapshots.
We are not using Active Directory or Samba (we want to use Samba4 domain
functions) Right now, authentication is strictly by LDAP on the 'sogo'
box, but each Windows machine requires accounts.
Domain functions will simply allow us to synchronize account parameters,
and we're not there yet.
It may not matter whether you use VMware or VirtualBox, but if it can be
installed natively via the ISO, that might work better for disk space
needs. Maybe you can point the shared mailboxes to a separate storage
server? It might make backup easier to do incremental backups of the
mailboxes only.
Or, just do a mirror on the separate storage server?
We define 'dns' on our gateway and ip_phone devices (6-7 phones, 15-20
ip_addresses plus wlan)
We have a separate storage server which we use for backup (Novaback on
the Windows side)
We've taken 'dns' and other network services away from the Windows
boxes, but we define the printers via the Remote Desktop Connection
(terminal services) on the Windows RDC Server.
Everybody uses the same applications (with some lockdown on certain apps
or files/folders)
Our ZEG does 'ldap' authentication and mail services. We want to use it
as a Samba domain later, but we will have to install Samba4 (as it was
not originally in the ZEG) and configure user accounts.
We're using a mix of Windows 7 and (two) Linux Mint clients.
We have one PIII-386 Linux Thinstation that works better than the
Windows clients! It's amazing.
It sounds like the bottleneck in your environment are the large shared
mail accounts. Move them to a separate storage server (point the
mailboxes via 'webmin') and you should free up resources.
Just a thought ....
On 02/18/2013 03:20 PM, administrator wrote:
Since EXI/ESXI? Server didn't work with my own hardware, I built a massive
monster set of servers with a core i7 24+ GB ram each, WIN2K8 Hosts, running
Vmware server 2.0. However nightly windows backups of about 10 VM's really
takes a strain on vmware server's performance, so for brief periods machines
become undersponsive during that time.
I was messing around with virtualbox 4.2 in headless mode so I can measure how
much better the performance is, plus I can assign an unlimited number of cpu
cores and it's free. ESX server is just linux with a hypervisor on top anyways,
nothing really native about it like they say it is, so I'm assuming virtualbox
will have similar performance on Ubuntu 12.04. The other benefit will be the
linux block level caching that windows doesn't have.
The unusual requirement that is a bit too much for a VM is the fact that we
have jumbo shared inboxes (Shipping/Support etc...) where each one has about 10
people using the same box simultaneously, and they do searches all the time
when the DB's are 200GB+ sometimes. Mail is just one of those things that I
want to completely isolate from my active directly and windows infrastructure
now. Since we only have about 10 actual email accounts anyways. This way if the
domain controller isn't up before the mail server, there's no messed up
authentication, etc...
This is a problem I often have when it comes to windows, having too many things
relying on each other makes for headaches after power outages etc. Windows
updates being the worst. So the idea is one independent box, it's own Open
LDAP, it's own DNS (copying my internal zone from my windows dns) and then
deleting my existing mail servers.
At some point, if I find Ubuntu is a stable active directory replacement, get
rid of each windows server one by one (if possible). For vm's at least the
hosts being Ubuntu also.
-K
--
users@sogo.nu
https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
