Are you using sendmail (or something like it)? It is well known that having mail clients NFS mount the mail spool is not scalable. That is one reason why IMAP is so popular in large scale e-mail systems. I suggest you look at using something designed to scale, such as the Sun Java Communications Suite: http://www.sun.com/software/communications_suite/index.xml
It works fine under ZFS and does implement quotas. -- richard Jorgen Lundman wrote: > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Trial x4500, zfs with NFS and quotas. > Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:46:33 +0900 > From: Jorgen Lundman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > > > Hello list; > > We are users of NetApps, currently needing to expand. We thought to try > a x4500 since Jonathan suggested it might be better/cheaper. Sun very > kindly shipped us a trial x4500 unit, even though we are in Tokyo. We > probably are not as big a company as Sun is used to, and would only buy > two x4500 this cycle, but it would be nice to get some questions answered. > > The version of Solaris (zfs) that the x4500 was shipped with, was very > old and painfully slow, so I installed the latest OpenSolaris I could > find during my trials. > > Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 snv_70b X86 > SunOS x4500.unix 5.11 snv_70b i86pc i386 i86pc > > > > The legacy setup on current NetApps are in the style of: > > /export/mail/m/e/0/0/meNNNNN00/ > /export/mail/m/e/0/1/meNNNNN01/ > . . > /export/mail/m/e/9/9/meNNNNN99/ > > > Each user has a quota. I have used 30M during my tests, but it really > would differ in real life. > > The smallest volume we have on the NetApp (/export/mail/) has 194172 users. > > > *** NFS Option > > Start: > > Since we need quota per user, I need to create a file-system of > size=$quota for each user. > > But NFS will not let you cross mount-point/file-systems so mounting just > "/export/mail/" means I will not see any directory below that. > > (I don't suppose there is some hack to let me cross file-systems?) > > *** > > On the NFS client side, this would mean I would have to do 194172 NFS > mounts to see my file-system. Can normal Unix servers even do this? That > just is not very realistic. This would cut out many old systems, and > probably some Unix flavours. > > > *** > > From Googling, it seems suggested that I use automount, which would cut > out any version of Unix without automount, either from the age of the OS > (early Sun might be ok still?) and Unix flavours without automount. > > So I would have to migrate the entire system to be 100% Sun, today and > "forever". Not exactly ideal. I'm sure Sun would be very happy with such > a commitment, but that just is not feasible right now. > > > *** > > Alright, let's try automount. It seems it does not really do > /export/mail/m/e/X/Y very well, so I would have to list 0/0 -> 9/9 each, > so 100 lines in automount. Probably that would be possible, just not > very attractive. > > * /export/mail/m/e/0/0/& > . . > * /export/mail/m/e/9/9/& > > > *** nfsv4 > > There were some noise about future support that will let you cross > file-systems to nfsv4 (mirror mounts). But this doesn't seem to exist > right now. It would also cut out any old systems, and any Unix flavour > that does not yet do nfsv4 and mirror mounts. > > > *** iscsi? > > Could I share the zpool with iscsi, use ufs with ufs-quotas? But I am > then limited to any OS with iscsi, and ufs. Could this even do multiple > writers? > > > *** software quotas? > > Probably the only realistic option for zfs/x4500 at this time. It is > "most likely" that we can do software quota with the specific software > we are wanting to use, but we would always have to look out for smart > people getting around it, software bugs etc. > > > *** > > Answer: x4500 can not replace NetApp in our setup. > > We would either have to go without quotas, or, cut out any old Unix > server versions, or non-Solaris Unix flavours. x4500 is simply not a > real NFS server (because we want quotas). > > Ironically, this would probably work if we used Samba, as it doesn't > care about file-systems. > > Please tell me I am wrong. I really wanted this to work, as the price > per GB is quite attractive. Also, zfs is very neat. > > > > > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
