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Multi-Site Clustering Using Gateways
Question asked by Scarab - 11/18/2014 at 1:46 PM
Unanswered
Background: We are using Smartermail Enterprise Edition as our primary mail server, with two Smartermail Free Edition Incoming/Outgoing Gateways. Although we have two fail-over connections (one Fiber, one T3) at our primary Data Center, we are in an isolated area that is prone to service-disruptions as they share the same geographical upstream link/route that is maintained by a Tier 2 firm (who controls all traffic in/out of our geographical area) that is unable to properly grep BGP and thereby causing short (@ 2 hour) outages at least once a week. We are wanting to add additional fail-over for mail services by moving some systems to our secondary Data Center which has more reliable upstream routes from Tier 1 providers.
 
Question: If we move one of our DNS Servers, and one of our Incoming/Outgoing Gateways to our second Datacenter, would we also be able to use Smartermail Enterprise Edition clustering to work across multi-site clustering? I know that Microsoft Windows Server 2012 supports this type of clustering but was unsure if Smartermail Enterprise Edition supported multi-site clustering.
 
If Smartermail Enterprise Edition does support multi-site clustering, how would one configure DNS for customer POP/IMAP/SMTP to find the off-site location in the event of not being able to connect to our primary Data Center? (Would round-robin DNS work or would this break email services?)

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Scarab Replied
If it helps any, here is what we currently have configured:
 
 
And this is basically what we would want to do (oversimplified):
 
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Chris Daley Replied
Not going to work I'm afraid. SM supports MS NLB and that's it for clustering (if you can call MS NLB clustering, far from it)
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Scarab Replied
Chris,
 
That's what I was afraid of.
 
It would probably be easier to just move all of our Mail Services to our secondary Data Center, but the reason we have not done so is because our traffic at that location is metered and costs us Flat Monthly Rate + $ per GB usage, whereas our connections into our primary Data Center are unmetered at a Flat Monthly Rate. The volume of daily email traffic we handle would equate to a substantial increase in cost by migrating these services entirely to a different location.
 
I guess we can always setup our secondary DNS & Smartermail Incoming Gateway at that location as a fail-over so we can at least continue to receive email during these frequent outages, even if geographically remote customers would not be able use Webmail/POP3/IMAP/SMTP during these times.
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Chris Daley Replied
Yeah its your only option I'm afraid, at least email would be held until the primary server is back online.
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CLEBER SAAD Replied
Exchange 2013/2016 (the MBX can replicate to another) work's with this configuration. I guess the Smartermail work's too in v17 or 18 :)

Zimbra have a interesting function were you can have the same domain in various servers and accounts replicated (mirror) or separated by servers

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