Enterprise Vault / Discovery Accelerator and VMWare ESX
Our organization uses a 100% VMWare environment. For the most part, this has worked quite well, but I have noticed that certain portions of the Enterprise Vault roles do not function well in a virtual environment. The current configuration is below. All servers are Windows 2003 SP3 32-bit. The roles and general virtual configuration is listed. Each EV# is it's own server. The environment is approximately 5000 users. We have gone through the performance guide several times and have made a good amount of the recommendations as applicable.
Servers:
EV1 - Mailbox Archiving
4 procs (these 4 cores have been dedicated in VMWare for this virtual machine), 4 GB RAM, 5 index locations each on it's own LUN on NetApp, Vault Cache on dedicated drive on NetApp
EV2 - Journal Archiving
4 procs, 4 GB RAM, 1 index location on NetApp
EV3 - Directory and PST Location (Locating only, no collection or importing)
2 procs, 4 GB RAM
EV4 - Discovery Accelerator
2 procs, 4 GB ram
EV5 - SQL 2005 32-bit
4 procs, 4 GBs, dedicated drives for Logs and Data (seperated)
Current Issues:
- EV1 is completely running non-stop 100% all four procs 24 hours a day. Indexing issues that require restarting of services approximately 2-3 times per week.
- EV4 and EV5 - The enabling of analytics throws all four processors on EV5 to 100%. The creation of full text XML files from this causes extreme performance hits. Estimated time to complete 100,000 items for analytics is 8.4 hours (possibly longer).
Questions:
- Does anyone have a similar size environment and uses VMWare?
- Has anyone been able to enable analytics successfully within a VMware environment? How large was the case? Did you have the same problem with the full text searching?
- I would love to get a definitive answer on VMWare environment and Enterprise Vault. I only can find general recommendations but not a specific, "hey, with this number of mailboxes you will have this much lost in a VMWare environment" statement.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
- That seems a bit slow. I know you have you seen the performance guide
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/312319.htm
but have you seen the best practice guide?
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Discovery_Accelerator_Module/326055.pdf
Also, you are on EV and DA 8.0 sp2, right?
Compatability table:
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Exchange_Mailbox_Archiving_Unit/276547.pdf