Advice on hardware for upgrading EV 7.5 SP3 to EV 10.x.
Rob is right. The number of messages on the A5 queue should never be more than the number of mailboxes that are being archived by that task. The fact that you have so many indicates that archiving has been lagging behind for months. Purge the A5 queue when EV is stopped - and then purge the admin queue of the messages after they are transferred there.
A few thoughts:
Regarding the upgrade, you havent mentioned which version of OS you are going to put on there, and you also have not detailed if you are going to use VMWare or if it is even available. You may well make more efficient use of resources by having two virtual instances on the same machine of 8core 16GB of RAM than one monster machine. The Windows 2008 R2 enterprise license will cover this - it allows a host and 4VM on the same box.....but it would require partitioning the environment and you probably have all items sat in one vault store. You would have the same issue with 2x 8cpu, physical 16GB servers which probably work out slightly more expensive. Therefore it would be easier to keep this as one server.
I doubt you will have any issues with the load in EV9 - I've seen boxes with half the spec only use around 40% capacity to archive 5000 mailboxes (at a rate of around 1600 mailboxes/hr) as you have two tasks you should be able to get through the mailboxes assuming your exchange is fast enough (although it is on the edge of what is recommended). EV10 is another matter and the increased processing and memory requirements for indexes etc mean for for less headroom.
You may consider setting up new vault stores and provisioning users into those for potential scale-out in the future. If you are using single instancing across the vault store group this would not lead to any extra storage requirement.
Indexing storage requirements may go up 60% if moving from medium indexing in EV2007 to full x64 bit indexes in EV10. This may add a bit of cost you were not expecting. Of course, you dont HAVE to move to x64bit indexes
Citrix = no vault cache to hide delays.
Using a product like archive shuttle to go direct may well cut down on the space used historically due to the optimized single single instancing - especially if you were using collections as well. It depends on how much you are going to save in storage costs vs the cost of archive shuttle.
You might also consider implementing storage expiry in an effort to remove some of the historic storage. Remember again though - if you are using collections you may well get back less than you expect if only some of the items in each cab are deleted.
Regards.
Jeff
