EV and Exchange 2010 Dumpster

For the dumpster, an archiving process will not make the dumpster grow unless you say delete original and dont create shortcut, as the archiving process is just an edit of the existing item.

With Virtual Vault if you drag a load of items from one place to the other, it will cause the dumpster to grow as when you move an item from inbox to virtual vault, its actually a copy and a delete.

With Legal Holds and Versioning in Exchange 2010 you would see the exchange database explode, for the fact that you have the original item, you then might reply to it, so you have two copies of that email, you then archive it and it first goes to pending, so you have a third copy and then it becomes shortcutted, you then have a fourth copy 

There is some back and forth regarding White space reclaimation with Exchange 2010 and i believe something may be coming out fairly soon from microsoft to deal with the issue, as some customers are seeing a lot of used space in their Exchange Database where as the mailbox sizes remain fairly small.

Hi,

can someone from Symantec confirm that? (sorry Jesuswept2, i just heard a lot of different opinions on that topic now :( )

If a mail is archived it gets acutally edited with the new shortcut content, and *not* deleted and replaced with a "new" shortcut?

We are only working with shortcuts there.

no problem i understand, what i can say is that the company i work for has had an ongoing case for months with both Microsoft and Symantec on this very issue andi believe we may have been one of the first to really analyze this and its affects from an echange database growth point.

I believe there are statements both from symantec in the form of technots and also from microsoft on their exchange blogs

Well, our customer did activate a lot of mailboxes (after testphase) yesterday and hat a huge archiving run this night. The Exchange DB did grow in size (around 70GB) over the night.

We are trying to figure out, what happened.

We also have a call with microsoft now, as we are unable to delete the most of the user dumpster to shrink the internal size of the DB. I guess i will have to open a case with symantec tomorrow too. 

Can you provide  links to those statements? (or keywords to google them)

This should be an element of the new installation guide :) Check the dumpster settings!

well its not just the dumpster settings, theres an actual issue with with the online/offline defrag in exchange 2010, we'd seen this even without EV being involved because to be honest MS were originally trying to pin this on any archiving solution that made stubs, but we gave them push back as well as symantec.

Will try and find the blogs and technotes regarding this

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH164949

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/ev-90-and-exchange-2010-whitespace

Here is the blog Mr J Wept was talking about - http://blogs.technet.com/b/bill_long/archive/2011/09/02/the-effects-of-archival-stubs-on-database-space-management.aspx

Microsoft also have a beta fix out for the white space issue - you will need to call Microsoft to get it though.

I just want to clear a couple of things up regarding how EV creates shortcuts and deletes items.

1. When a shortcut is created it is the original item being modified - it is not a new message. (There's an edge case when using Entourage 2004/2008 and turning on 'Shortcut sync for mail clients' then you get a new message as the shortcut but this isn't the norm).

2. When the archiving task deletes shortcuts or messages we bypass the dumpster (known as a hard delete, a soft delete means it goes to the dumpster - for example a SHIFT+Delete in Outlook is a Soft delete).

As you've noted the fix from MSFT is available - the technote TECH164949 has been updated this morning and I've also written a blog post (linked within the article - sorry for self advertising!).

Regards

Karl

Thanks

we have an open call with Microsoft now. There are two exchange 2010 environemnts with ev9 we can test with.

I will report back if the fix helps.