Hello,

I am trying to use two CentOS 5.5 boxes to serve up email. I wish to loadbalance HTTP, IMAP, POP3, and SMTP between the two servers. The servers are not in a cluster (the email software does not require it).

What filesystem could be used to distribute/replicate the files between the two servers?

I have tried NFS, GFS, and GlusterFS. All of which work but result in a latency that is unacceptable to the end users (webmail clients).

Thanks,

Bryan

Hi Brian,

What exactly do you want to achieve?

Can you please elaborate on the latency problems your users experienced?

Please give us a general picture of your environment and the services you would like to support.

Two email servers one loadbalancer performing round robin loadbalancing of http, imap, pop3, and smtp.

My goal is to replicate files between two servers. When email is accessesed (HTTP, IMAP, POP3, or SMTP) I wish to have the changes automatically synchronized with the other server. I then can have a failover setup as if one server failed the other can perform all email functions.

So not necessarily a shared storage place but a replicated file system like (Gluster) would be ideal. Although a shared storage like NFS would not be out of the question.

The latency experience was simply slow load of http access to email. We went from less than a second to load an email to over 8 seconds when using a shared storage like NFS or GFS. Gluster was a bit faster but still way to slow.

Thanks

Why not DRBD?

http://www.drbd.org/

I think IBM's gpfs filesystem has a shareware version.