Re: Zimbra server failover question

[Rich Graves <rgraves@carleton.edu>]

> Accounts are tied to their server. If you have identical servers with 
> /opt/zimbra mounted from a SAN, you can move accounts to a different 
> server by mounting the same SAN storage and changing the failover 
> server's IP and hostname to match, making it in effect the same as the 
> failed machine.

The base hostname actually doesn't need to match. You just need to add
an alias IP address and mount the LUN. This is how the Zimbra-supported
RHCS and Veritas packages work, so you're not doing anything unsupported.

> The obvious solution to accomplish what you want would be to install a 
> virtual cluster of some sort (Xen, VMWare, whatever) on your base 
> hardware, and then install Zimbra in virtual machines.

Or a hybrid: Production instance on hardware, and VMs that could map
/opt/zimbra from the SAN. That's what we do.

VMs are nice for cluster failover because they boot so much faster than
hardware.