1 Topic by okomili

  • okomili
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Topic: Need advice for partitioning, sizing HD

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I am about to install CentOS 6.4 (64bit) on a 4TB drive.
I will be using the server with IRedMail (MySQL).
In order to have the max user space (mailboxes) and max number of users, how do you suggest I partition the HD? And I allocate space for the mount points?

Thanks in advance.

Omer

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Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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  • Registered: 2009-05-06
  • Posts: 31,090

Re: Need advice for partitioning, sizing HD

Below are some points you should consider:

* Postfix queue is placed under /var/spool/postfix/. How much disk space it takes depends on how many messages scheduled (active, deferred, etc) in queue.

* All mailboxes and sieve scripts are placed under /var/vmail/vmail1/ by default. This directory need large disk space. [I have tip about this below.]

* iRedMail has daily cron job to backup mail accounts (not mailboxes), stored under /var/vmail/backup/ by default. Backup is just a simple database dump with command 'mysqldump', and dumped SQL file will be compressed by default.

* MySQL databases will take some disk space, databases are placed under /var/lib/mysql/ (on RHEL/CentOS) by default.

* Amavisd will extract and decode received emails to /var/spool/amavisd/ (on RHEL/CentOS 6) by default, how much disk space it takes depends on how many emails it will process concurrently (set by "$max_servers" in amavisd.conf). Also, if you choose to quarantine detected SPAM/VIRUS on file system, it need some more disk space.

* All directories mentioned above are just default values on RHEL/CentOS 6, you can mount new directories on different partitions, then create above directories as symbol link to these partitions. For example, create directory /mnt/db and mount it to a partition, then move all data under /var/lib/mysql/ to /mnt/db/, remove empty directory /var/lib/mysql/, then create symbol link /var/lib/mysql to /mnt/db. NOTE: This is just a suggestion, not a must have operation.

* Balancing disk I/O on different disks/partitions to get better performance.

* RAID 10 is better than RAID 5 for mail service. [NOTE: This has been discussed in Postfix mailing list many times, do some research please.]