HaProxy/TProxy Load Balancing

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I have been tasked with setting up load balancing for mail servers using HaProxy and TProxy (as well as keepalived) in a RHEL 7 environment. There seems to be limited documentation for this. Any suggestions on where to start?

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Are you thinking about the MTA-side (SMTP servers like Sendmail, Postfix etc.), mailbox-service side (IMAP/POP servers) or both?

For whichever role, the load balancing of the network connections is probably the easiest part. Your first problem is setting up the shared mail spool and/or mailbox storage which is concurrently accessible from multiple mail servers and has enough I/O performance to warrant having multiple mail servers working at it. Once you have the storage solution figured out and have at least two servers working with it, you add the load balancing layer in front of them to make multiple servers seem like just one from the users' viewpoint.

Thanks. This will be from the MTA side. Without getting into great detail, we already have haproxy with tproxy load balancing SMTP traffic as well as other mail services for the mail cluster. Those LBs are also handling other services for other servers. We want to move mail to its own LBs. Someone else set up the original LBs and is no longer with the company so I am trying to install the new LBs and config them from the ground up.

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