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Is it possible to install the software on a backup machine and setup the DNS so that if the first server fails it kicks over the backup machine?

I know about the smarthost option but to me that is only really a short term temp option whereby users will still not be able to access their mail should the primary server go down.

Cheers,

Stephen

Most backup mail systems for small scale operations use the "short term option" you mention above. This is where a backup mail server will accept the mail for your domains and deliver them back to the primary server when it comes back online.

However, as you point out, this does not allow customers to check their mail while the primary is down.

In order to do what you want you will need to use a shared storage system for mail and user accounts, you will also need to duplicate all account changes on both mail servers.

Then you will need to automate a DNS failover so that access to your primary webmail is switched to the backup.

Keep in mind that this is configuration is not supported by SmarterMail.

You will also want to make sure that the two SmarterMail service are not running concurrently. This is to ensure that you don't have both processes trying to access the mailboxes simultaneously.

Has anyone setup something like this, and would you mind sharing a bit in your experiences about it?

 I'm pretty sure all you need to do is replicate the setup (copy all the relavent folders) to your back mail server and then modify your MX record and detail the backup server...

We ended up throwing the SM server on our VMware ESX 3.5 cluster with HA, DRS, and VMotion. All 8 of the 32 GB RAM, dual quad core 2.5 Xeon servers in the cluster have redundant iSCSI connections through 2 switches to our 5 LeftHand NSM2120 clustered SANs. It's a total of 64 processing cores, 160 GHZ, and 256 GB of RAM. This works extremely well. Unfortunately it's a $250k cluster that obviously runs a lot of other stuff and is serious overkill for just failover email.

You could get by with something like the VI3 Standard HA Acceleration kit. It comes with licenses for 4 processors (2 dual processor servers, doesn't count cores), Virtual Center to manage it with up to 3 servers, and HA. It won't move failed servers on the fly or automatically move virtual servers to hosts with the most resources, but if you have a failure it will reboot the virtual machine on the other box. For hardware, you would need a minimum of 2 similar servers, and an iSCSI server that will work with VMware. You're looking at about $7500 for the licensing and mandatory support on the VMware. It could be a good solution if you have multiple web or email servers that you need failover for that is relatively easy to implement.

I don't know if this would be in your price budget, but I have tested and run it in both of the configurations I have mentioned and know it works.