Q: Xsan mail server clustering in OS X Server (10.8)
The Server version of Mountain Lion, OS X Server, emphasises on Xsan, but my question is what to expect, what changes will I have to make to my current configuration (4 mac mini servers + an iomega NAS) to build myself an "enterprise class" mail system and is that worth the costs or is this just good old Apple marketing?
OS X Server, 8GB, 2,93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Posted on Jul 29, 2012 10:15 AM
What XSan version is in Mountain Lion? I'm still not seeing an XSan User Guide newer than v2.3 which came out with Lion. Funny enough on http://www.apple.com/xsan/ the photo is a box for XSan 2.2.
Umm, I personally find it a bit odd that XSan/Stornext is referred to as a clustered filesystem rather than a shared disk file system. If you're looking for high-availability storage, then you need a distribute or distribute+replicate so that the storage itself has redundancy (not just one disk fails but something takes out the entire array). In the case of a Mail server cluster, it's the Mail servers that are redundant not the storage.
If it were me, I'd change as little as necessary, and migrate to something else entirely down the road. This gives you some time to see what, if anything, Apple is going to do with XSan before you invest more in it. And time to research alternatives. There's a lot going on in open source in this area now that do not require FC, dedicated metadata servers, and are highly scalable.
Posted on Jul 29, 2012 1:02 PM