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@Condor Maybe I can weigh in? As far as I can tell, your mail servers qualify for being called “High Availability”. In a networking context that usually means multiple physical ports and multiple IPs for the same machine, with a failover machine just-in-case. In a cloud or enterprise context HA usually means having a server farm of boxes setup doing the same thing you’re doing with your email servers, but with maybe 5 or 10 in a cluster.
It used to be servers were physical and pricy so the whole “multiple servers on failover” thing wasn’t cost effective. People would just have one server with 4 ports and 4 IPs, hook into different network switches and cross their fingers to prevent power outages.
So yeah, as far as I can tell you’re doing HA with your mail servers. -
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@Diactoros Sorry for not replying sooner, admittedly I was already way past Ballmer peak when posting this so I didn't feel comfortable commenting :P
(pretty impressive though how I can nowadays still type proper intelligible sentences even when I had 4 Duvels.. it kinda worries me to be honest)
Anyway, thanks for the helpful reply!
@Linux Thanks for the confirmation!
Just now I was reading on https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/... about high availability. Now my Proxmox VE is just a tower (which happens to have ECC memory) that's stored in my storage room (and which is mostly used for experimental and home server purposes). But my mail servers.. those have been made with high availability in mind. Most importantly, I've made their services entirely redundant (but within the same datacenter). And when they have updates, I apply updates to one, reboot, see if it didn't break something and then do the same to the other server after the first one came up again. So no downtime whatsoever.
If memory serves me right, I think that I've been able to maintain these servers for the last year without any downtime at all (I reboot them every month to apply new kernels but they haven't both been simultaneously down at any moment). Does that make them High Availability? My interventions regarding their availability have been rather trivial. Is it really that hard..?
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