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How Do We -- New servers, Dual IP - 2 differnet ISPs - failover, redundancy, etc.
Question asked by Curtis Kropar www.HawaiianHope.org - 10/26/2021 at 4:18 PM
Answered
Hey All.  
So, In part of a larger project we are planning to migrate off of virtual servers in a data center, back to servers in our office. We are running SM 14.xxx Enterprise, 30 domains, currently 250 mailboxes, but expected to grow.  I want to upgrade and take advantage of new capabilities, including API scripting, along with several other things, and, more direct control over backups. With the move, we are forced to change IP addresses. We could run the SM servers as VM's here in our office too, so that is a consideration.

We have 2 different internet services here at our office, Fiber and Cable. Fiber is 300Mb Symmetrical, Cable is 600x35.  Each connection has 5 Static IP's. We are using PFSense as the firewall and doing awesome for over a year now. (In house servers, VoIP servers, TrueNAS servers, etc)

My Questions : 
1) Is it possible to set up SmarterMail to use 2 different IP Addresses on the same box (or VM's), 1 from each of the service providers ? How would this be configured for (or get along with) eMail IP reputations ? What other problems might we run into ?

2) Would it make sense to set up SmarterMail on 2 seperate servers (bare metal or VM's), 1 IP (service) to each server, and use the 2nd server as a fail over or redundancy ? If so, how would that be configured ? What other problems might we run into ? Does this require 2 sets of licenses ?

3) Or, with all of you SM experts out there, what suggestions might you have for us to do this migration ?

4) And of course, can we in fact Migrate our existing SM domains and email boxes over to the new setup without cooking the data.

5) Once we Identify the configuration we want to use, Can we ask you guys at SmarterPeeps (or would anyone else want to help) to set the whole thing up and configure it for us (showing us what you did too) ? (keep in mind we are a non profit org.. hint, hint...) I would rather pay someone to do it and make sure it is done perfectly, than to have to fumble around, 'trial and error', and figure it out ourselves.  Yes, we are IT peeps and pretty good, and I know we can "figure it out", but that means errors and its the error part that gets expensive (and takes too much time.)

The Why : We are a non profit org, www.HawaiianHope.org - We get nice servers and enterprise hardware donated to us all of the time. We have no shortage of hardware, we have (8+)  24 core machines, 48Gig+ ram, 10Gig Cisco switches, multiple SAN's , etc. But Instead, we have been paying $350 a month for some squalor virtual servers for the past several years, with only dual core and 4 gig of RAM. Any random thing we have sitting in our warehouse is far more powerful than we are paying for. And our total traffic is minimal, under a 3M/s of typical bandwidth usage. So even a basic internet connection will suffice.  

Plus, as mentioned above, we are also setting up another project, which requires us to have more robust servers set up here in our office anyway. So hey, we are already making some changes, may as well include this and drop the extra $350 a month.

THANK YOU !


www.HawaiianHope.org - Providing technology services to non profit organizations, low income families, homeless shelters, clean and sober houses and prisoner reentry programs. Since 2015, We have refurbished over 11,000 Computers !

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Hi Curtis,

1) SmarterMail can use any IP address that is in the server's NIC. It shouldn't matter if they are from the same ISP or different one. And you can configure individual domains to use specific IP addresses. You will need to ensure both IP addresses have bindings in SmarterMail, make sure both are referenced in the SPF records, and make sure the outbound IP matches the IP associated with the hostname they go by.

2) SmarterMail does support failover, which is an active/passive configuration. Because only one server is active at a time you only need 1 enterprise license per primary server. You'll find more information about this in our online help article Configuring SmarterMail for Failover.

3 & 4) There are a couple of options for migrating SmarterMail to a new server with all the data intact. You can manually copy over the files necessary to the new server or use Robocopy. Here are the links to the to kb articles with those instructions:
Migrate SmarterMail to a Different Server
Use Robocopy to move from one server to another

5) We offer Installation Assistance ($349) to have one of our support agents install or upgrade your installation. We also offer Product Training, where you can schedule an hour ($199) for training and you set the agenda. I'm afraid these options do not include migration services, so we would not be able to migrate your data to the new server for you.

However, if your license has current Maintenance and Support you can open a support ticket once you've completed the migration and one of our support agents can help ensure mail is flowing.

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