Hello all,
I am implementing a new mail server into our environment consisting of three machines - two Dell Opterons that will act as load balanced Postfix servers, and a 1.5TB RAID10 NFS server. All three machines are running CentOS 4.5.
Since the NFS is going to be used for only mail, I was kicking around the idea to use XFS. I have CentOS installed on an ext3 partition, and with the leftover space on the NFS I created an XFS partition. I tried to implement XFS into the kernel, and was coming across some issues. Even after installing xfprogs and xfsprogs-devel, and issuing the command:
yum --enable-plusrepos install kernel
I booted up the kernel and still could not mount my XFS share. I keep getting this error:
mount: fs type xfs not supported by kernel
After googling around (and not finding out how to get XFS enabled in the kernel), people had some concerns about using XFS due to issues and it being about as fast as ext3.
Also people said that I might run into issues with XFS if I run NFS+lvm+xfs+md but I'm not sure if I run lvm and md and if that applies to me.
I found this benchmarking blog someone wrote that compares the speeds in Ubuntu with all the filesystems in a Postfix server environment (although it's not NFS):
http://piao-tech.blogspot.com/2007/04/file-system-benchmarks-for-postfix-mai...
With all this said, I'd like to use XFS, if it indeed is going to be the fastest for the solution I want to implement. If you guys can help me get that installed by telling me what I need - great! If you think XFS isn't going to work as efficiently and fast as I want it to, and there is another filesystem (such as ext3) that will be more stable and just as fast in my setup, I'm all ears.
Thanks everyone in advance.
Patrick