Hi, I’m planning to move my mail setup from one primary and one backup MX to two MXes with equal priority, and one backup MX.
To achieve that, I have of course two options available for setting up
my MX records:
(1) example.com. MX 23 primary.example.com.
example.com. MX 42 backup.example.com.
backup.example.com. A/AAAA <address of server a>
backup.example.com. A/AAAA <address of server b>
(2) example.com. MX 23 primary-a.example.com.
example.com. MX 23 primary-b.example.com.
example.com. MX 42 backup.example.com.
Now I know both of these setups are possible and should lead to load
distribution between servers a and b, and fallback to the other server if
one is unavailable, or to the backup server if both primary servers are
unavailable.
I wonder, however, if either option has particular advantages from an
operational perspective, or if they are indeed equal.
I’ve tried both options in a test environment and played around with
various scenarios (one, two servers being unreachable, etc). With both
options I’ve seen good fallback and load distribution behaviour from
incoming mail servers after having attracted some test traffic.
Naturally though, my test traffic is a bit limited, so I’d be interested
to hear if you guys have any operational experience that would recommend
either of the options over the other, e.g. if there are broken
implementations out there that will work better with one of the options,
or anything else. Note that although load distribution is nice, I’m
mostly looking for high availability, so I’m most interested to know if
fallback mechanisms work as nice in reality as they do in my test setup.
Regards,
-- Leon.
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