Overview
Please be aware that this feature is supported starting with the 9.4.2 release.
This article shares information about Kerio Connect Multi-Server and its limitations.
Kerio Connect Multi-Server
Kerio Connect Multi-Server is a distributed architecture solution designed for easy scalability. All users access their Kerio Connect account through a single server address, regardless of their home server. The connection is directed to the user's server automatically.
You can use Kerio Connect Multi-Server when:
- There are a large number of on-premise installations, and you need to reduce the load on each server for improving the Kerio Connect performance.
- You need to distribute server environments for using a single domain and URL for accessing the mailboxes.
- Kerio Cloud Solution Partner hosted on your Kerio Connect Cloud environment needs to distribute users across multiple servers.
Current Limitations
All architectural components of Kerio Connect Multi-Server are available and ready to use. However, it has the following functional limitations:
- Users can see shared folders across all servers only in Kerio Connect Client with Kerio Outlook Connector (Offline Edition).
- To enable sharing, set the
EnabledFolderSharingvariable of theMultiServertable in the mailserver.cfg configuration file to1as indicated here:<variable name="EnabledFolderSharing">1</variable>
- To enable sharing, set the
- Users cannot share public folders across the servers.
- The Greylisting service is not available.
- IP address groups in user access policies are available only for HTTP/HTTPS.
- Kerio Connect does not support redundancy outside of the multi-server deployment. However, you can set up the redundancy at the DNS level, as indicated below:
- Set up two separate hardware servers with the first one mirrored into the redundant server, so that all emails are copied over to the backup server. This way, in case of failure, the users will still have access to their emails.
The particular difficulty in achieving this would be that all users would have to use the hostname or FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) to connect to the server, and not the internal IP address. This will allow the users to connect to the online server, and the DNS provider should be able to supply you with a DNS failover type of service for the DNS records to be updated when the primary server is down.
Note: The above-described setup is beyond the scope of Kerio Support, as it depends on the DNS provider to supply you with the required services.
- Set up two separate hardware servers with the first one mirrored into the redundant server, so that all emails are copied over to the backup server. This way, in case of failure, the users will still have access to their emails.