Designing Enterprise Vault


Should I place the SQL server on the same machine as the Enterprise Vault server ?

Although it is possible to put the SQL server on the same machine as the archiving software, it is not recommended for 32 bit systems. The amount of available memory on such a 32 bit machine is limited to 3.xx GB. This leaves no space to scale the archiving infrastructure and increase the number of mailboxes to archive to above 1000 users. It wil also generate problems releted to the bad performance of the SQL server. Fortunately most machines nowadays are 64 bit and the memory can be extended far above the 4 GB limit on 32 bit systems.

Important remarks

  • The first server of a EV-site imports the pst files. This is not easy when the site is spread over different countries.
  • Alle mailboxes must be member of a provisioning group, otherwise they will not be archived.
  • If all stores have been closed, archiving will not run anymore. In this case we will not receive any warning while this is a critical situation.
  • You need access to the internet during the setup

 

Email message conversions done by Enterprise Vault

  1. EV takes the original item and converts it to HTML format.
  2. EV takes both the original item and the HTML representation of it and zips/compresses it
  3. After compression, it tries to use single instance storage to decrease the size even more.
  4. As a result, EV reduces the mailbox data to 50%-70% of the original size.

 

Indexing levels compared

brief indexing: +/- 3 % of archive size is index data
normal indexing: +/- 8 % of archive size is index data
full indexing: +/- 12 % of archive size is index data

 

Size of the SQL database is about 3% of the archive data size

 

Enterprise Vault creates gaps in the information store of Exchange. It replaces big emails with little shortcuts. A manual defragmentation of the Exchange store is necessary. A cleanup of shortcuts should be a good thing too.

Message queues are used because they provide a safe and robust solution with maximum performance.

"Include links to archived item" checkbox is used for other email clients, blackberry and apple users. Because they can't retrieve the item from the archive the usual way, the shortcut will include a link that is accessable for these email clients.

Set failed messages "do not archive": this means we'll throw away the items that are causing troubles instead of searching through the whole Information Store for the EOF of this corrupted item.

"Warn when mailbox not under quotum" : when using quotum based archiving this could be usefull. Keep in mind that the mailbox can get filled with shortcuts ( if enabled ) and this will generate warnings too.

Disabled archives do not count for licensing.

Shortcuttext.txt can be modified to configure the welcome message.

It's best to use the HTTP only add-in for Office 2010.

Do not log on twice on EV explorer: desktop policy -> advanced -> add EV servers

If Internet Explorer is "buggy", check "Automatically delete IE file cache".

If the archive buttons are not visible: re-enable the EV client.

It's better to journal email messages using Enterprise Vault than Exchange 2010. EV gives you the advantages of the single instance storage feature. While Exchange 2010 does not have that feature. ( it was removed from Exchange since version 2010 )

After every upgrade of Enterprise Vault, you should run the configuration wizard. The configuration wizard modifies the database.

There is two different deployment scanners: The deployment scanner that you can start via the server and right clicking on it and the deployment scanner that you can run before installation.

NetBackup is a Enterprise Vault aware backup solution. ( It is also a Symantec product ). It sees that transaction log files have been truncated.