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True Load Balancing for SmarterMail, Not Failover
Idea shared by Ron Raley - 8/10/2021 at 9:53 AM
Proposed
I am interested in easily configurable real-time true load balancing for SmarterMail.  Two SmarterMail servers splitting the work all the time.  When one server goes down, the other one takes the entire workload of email processing.

Not failover, where one server sits idle 24/7.

In theory, this can be done in the cloud with shared disks for the customer data paths.

Any thoughts are appreciated!  Thank you.  Ron


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I dont think it would work like that for SM. I'd assume you'd have locking issues/contention problems with the email data files and possibly the json data files. IE, both instances trying to write to the same data file at the same time, who wins? Or a data file gets deleted just as the other server is trying to write to the file that is now gone.

I assume this is why they do the idle failover, to prevent issues like this.
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I'm thinking of this more and I believe Windows Clustering with a shared disk can actually work.


Ron
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Kyle Kerst Replied
Employee Post
I think that might do the trick Ron, but I'm still reading through their documentation. That said, it sounds like they are set up to only allow write access to the disk/storage from one node at a time, which isn't dissimilar from our current setup. Are you thinking of using this in conjunction with the existing failover setup or what piece of your deployment are you thinking of using this for?
Kyle Kerst System/Network Administrator SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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So we are in need of a 100% uptime SMTP IN for 911 center dispatch emails.  We do this with our web servers for redundancy and to perform maintenance on one at a time.
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Matt Petty Replied
Employee Post
@Ron Raley
Could potentially setup a SM server as a gateway and have its job purely to receive email and pass it onto your primary server. The MX could contain both servers. That way if either goes down, you'll have one that accepts the email. Then keep the gateway server as thin as possible, acting only as a spool for your main server. Maybe have it's retries set lower that way if it fails to send a dispatch email to your primary in a failover case, it tries again very shortly.
Matt Petty Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com

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