MailGateway Virtual vs Phisical Server Pros and Cons

[Bzzz2000]

Hi everybody,

I´m new at the Forum and sorry if I´m posting this on the wrong place, but here we go:

Despite I´m beeing totally pro virtualization, my boss want´s to know the pros and cons about two types of MailGateway implementation, as the subject show. More specifically about performance issues.. I believe his afraid of performance problems on the virtual appliance. We have about 1000 active mailbox clients and we are using Vmware Vsphere 5.1

Today we have a phisical appliance with ProxMox MailGateway 2.6 and we are planning to buy the newer version. Knowing the pros and cons will be very useful to take the correct decision.

Any help will be apreciated.

Thanks.

 

[tom]

if your virtual enviroment is powerful enough, no problem.

I mean, without any info about your systems and load its not really possible to give advice.

 

[Bzzz2000]

Thanks for the quick response...

There is any documentation about MailGateway that says basically if you have "X" mailboxes then you´ll need "X" processing power and "X" RAM memory for the apliance?

I found this document: http://www.proxmox.com/images/download/pmg/docs/MailGatewayDeploymentGuide-V1.9.pdf

which says:

Hard disks SAS Disk (15.000rpm) or SSD, Hardware Raid with battery backup and write cache enabled
CPU Two physical CPU with a lot of cores (e.g. Intel Xeon)
RAM 4 GB ECC

But there is no more info about it.. I try to contac one partner in Brazil without answer...

 

[martin]

no, as every email domain, network etc. is different. but as you run already 2.6, you know the load?

and very important, depending on the settings you can decrease the load for your mail gateway dramatically if you use all filtering methods on the SMTP level.

 

[Bzzz2000]

Follow our load for the last month, from the General Mail Statistics page:

EDIT: this is from day 19 until the end of the month. We were trying the Groupshield for Exchange by McAfee, but the results was not ok and we put proxmox back again...

Total mails and incoming mails: 508.134
Avg. mail processing time: 1.570 seconds
Incoming mail traffic: 8511.540 Mbyte 3332.2 Bytes/sec
Greylisted mails 0%
Junk Mails 77%
SPF rejects: 0%
Virus Mails 0.1 %

I think it´s ok to virtualize, ins´t?

I´ll check more info about filtering methods on SMTP level either

 

[wahmed]

I know it is an old Thread, but just wanted to post confirmation that Proxmox Mail Gateway does work great in Virtual Environment. This is the stats for the month of January 2014:


The virtual appliance filtering mails for 2 domains with about 100 mail boxes. It is far from 1000 mail boxes but i think the volume of incoming emails that matters. Yes we do get quite a bit SPAM. One of them domain is very very old thus known to Spammers. Hope the info helps future virtual appliance planners.