Novell GroupWise 2014

[Rodeoboy38]

I am looking to start a new SLES 11 SP3 / OES 11 SP3 server up on my ESXI 5 server to run GroupWise 2014.

I am pretty sure that the server its self should be thin Provisioned but I was wondering what type of provisioning to do for the NSS drive that will store my GroupWise system that will provide the best performance.

Also we only have 25 users, so I was wondering what would be a good setup as a Virtual server (# of CPUS / Cores / Ram).

Thanks,

Ken

[PLamontagne]

Hi Ken...

A couple of questions that may help me answer you.  What OS and Version of GroupWise are you currently running? At 25 users I am assuming one or two domains(two good for fault tolerance) one Post Office, one Internet gateway(gwia) and perhaps WebAccess. ow big is the Post office in disk storage space???? This is the most important issue. It will determine what type of disk to create.

Is this server doing anything else other than GroupWise? If It's only GroupWise any particular reason for using an OES 11 server and not just straight SLES 11?

Without some specifics about the system, # of messages it handles daily, disk space for the PO. I would say that this system would not require a lot of resources. I'd start with a System with 1 CPU and 6 GB of ram. VMFS5 has good enough performance for your disk storage , though my preference is to use an external datastore, so that the VM can be migrated to another host quickly.

Hope that helps.

Paul Lamontagne

Lamtech Consulting Inc.

Co-Author of The Caledonia Upgrade Guide for GroupWise 2014

http://www.caledonia.net/

[Rodeoboy38]

We are going to be running GroupWise 2014 with all of the POA/MTA/GWIA and Web access on the same box.

We only have one domain and Post office.

The Post office size will be 300GB

We average around 1000 emails a day

The server will only be doing GroupWise and we need OES on the server since our Backup software requires an NSS format in order to do per user restores on mailboxes.

Hopefull that covers it.

Thanks for replying to my post and giving some suggestions.

Sincerely,

Ken

[PLamontagne]

Ken,

300 GB for 25 users..wow..no retention policies I guess. May want to consider that since you are averaging out at 12 GB per mailbox. those are some big mailboxes.

Still the biggest issue is disk i/o for GroupWise as long as your disk subsystem is adequate.  What kind of SAN storage are you using? whatever it is you need to be getting at least 1 gb/sec throughput. There are some tools to test that. look at this  TSATEST Readme for Linux .If your disk system is fast enough the specs I mentioned earlier should be fine.

Paul

[Rodeoboy38]

We dont have that large of a Post Office yet but since we are starting to receive a lot more large PDFs we are planning for a larger mailboxes.  The largest one we have right now is 3GB.

My other question was though - In your opinion what type of disk provisioning should be used?

Just Wondering and thanks for all your input.

Sincerely,

Ken

[mike-p]

You can use the default Thick. option . We run some systems  with  po's up to 400g with this configuration. Mike

[Rodeoboy38]

Thanks for the information.

Sincerely,

Ken

[PLamontagne]

Ken,

Since GroupWise is all I/O I'd Thick Provision Eager Zero the drives. That way it will already be provisioned, so no additional overhead when space is needed. It will all ready be there.

Paul

[Rodeoboy38]

Thanks for the help.  I certainly appreciate it.

Thanks again,

Ken