Starting out with a Virtualmin 'mail' server and Virtualmin 'shared' server

Virtualmin
1

Hi. I am a newbie to Virtualmin and need a steer please.

We are an established small hosting provider. We have decided to migrate to Virtualmin. We started by setting up a new dedicated ‘mail’ server and moving our email-only customers onto that which has worked very well so far (a few weeks). We have now set up a separate ‘shared’ server in the same data centre and installed Virtualmin Pro on it yesterday. The idea currently is that the ‘mail’ server will only deal with mail and the ‘shared’ server will only do the website hosting. So if we have a customer who owns example.net, the email for example.net would be on our ‘mail’ server and www.example.net would be on our ‘shared’ server. I appreciate that Virtualmin could theoretically handle all of it on one installation, but our gut feeling is that they should be separate for ease of administration and to spread loadings.

  1. Is this a good approach?
  2. Assuming that it is, when creating a new VS on the ‘shared’ server, should I uncheck ‘Accept mail for domain’?
  3. Any other tips or thoughts for this general configuration?

Thanks in advance

2

  1. Yep, it’s always a good approach to avoid single points of failure. :slight_smile:

  2. Yes, you’d want to turn on only those features that the respective Virtualmin instance is supposed to serve. Note that you need to create a custom BIND zone template, to point the proper records to the other server. E.g. if you host the master zones on the “shared” server, you need to point the MX record to the other. If you host them on the “mail” server, you need to point “www.” etc to the other. Virtualmin will by default point all zone records to the local server, since it assumes it hosts all services on one machine.

  3. Do a lot of experimentation first, before you use this setup in production. :slight_smile: Virtualmin is primarily meant to host all services on one machine, so splitting it will require some manual work / testing.

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Thanks Locutus. I had already assumed that we would need to specify the relevant IP addresses in the zone files, of course, so that’s great. Thank you for your input.