MTA and High Availability

It is rarely advisable to put the MTA under HA control, but there are exceptional circumstances where this is warranted. If you have a requirement that mail delivery happens in a short, specified time frame, even in the event of hardware failure, then the MTA must be put under HA software control. In most environments, simply increase the number of MTAs that are available by one or more over the peak load requirement. This ensures that proper traffic flow can occur even with a single MTA failure, or in very large environments, when multiple MTAs are offline for some reason.

In addition, with respect to placement of MTAs, you should always deploy the MTA inside your firewall.