How to manage the Enterprise Vault data content when it grows big and you are running out of disk space ?

Hi People,

Can anyone suggest to me what is the best way to manage and sustain the Enterprise Vault data that grow bigger and larger every month ?

My situation is that whenever my Exchange Server 2007 database drive is running low of disk space, I'd go to lower down the EV archive items from 6 months into 5 months and now down to 3 months just to create some room to breathe in the Exchange Server mailbox. I understand that this is not resolving the problem in the best way as it should since we just shifting away the disk space usage from Exchange into the Enterprise Vault.

However what are my options to manage and sustain the growing data in the EV ?

Can i offload to tape for the Vault data disk and then deleting it manually, what happens with the indexing and search when the data is archived to tape and I want to retrieve it later for some reason ?

Any kind of assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Information Governance

Managing Backup Devices

Jeff_Shotton
13 years ago
So that would involve going to any version of EV9 (normally the latest service pack, which is 4R1 ), and then upgrading to EV 10 sp1.

The upgrade instructions for each release are in the install media in the folder named the same as the version you are upgrading to (or search for upgrade_instructions.pdf).

Once you have upgraded, IF you are going to re-index all the data for x64 indexes, and your ultimate plan is to move this data to tape, do the re-indexing next. If you are going to consolidate the vault stores onto fewer disks then the re-indexing can wait till afterwards (especially if you are using a new storage device because it will almost certainly be faster).

If you want to move everything off to tape, you need to use a migrator which is listed (Tivoli, Netbackup, Backup Exec for instance) so that Enterprise Vault can issue a recall to restore the cab files when they are needed. If you simply move everything off to tape and delete it, EV will not have a clue where the data has gone and if you run repair tools, will consider the database entries orphaned.

Other points to note: If you had medium level indexing (8% of original file size) and reindex your indexes will be converted to full which is 13% of original file size. Thus you will also need to prepare for the index data growing by around 62.5%

Regards,

Jeff

GertjanA
Moderator
13 years ago
Hi Dushan,

What you can use is collect and migrate.

It is a setting on the VSP.

What it does is the following.

After the defined period, EV puts the DVSxx files in a CABFile. Cabfile size can be defined, 10MB is default. You can then define to migrate the cabfiles to 3rd line storage (or tapes).

This will give you room on the main storage attached to the EV-server. Just add storage to the 3rd line storage if and when needed. In addition, you can add a new partition to the VS, and point that to a new disk.

Close the old partition, and start using the new one.

Take in account that if an old mail is retrieved, the cabfile is restored to the original location as a file with an archcab extention, extracted, and the dvs is returned to the user as the message recalled. The archcab file will be removed after 7 days (default).

What I had setup in a previous environment is:

Archive everything older than 30 days. Make cabfile after 4 weeks, migrate cabfile after 6 weeks. This means you have cabfiles on the ev-server accounting for 10 weeks of archived data. Monitoring learned that recalls of archived items older than 10 weeks seldom happened.

also notice that if you need to re-index, the cabfiles will be recalled too.

Hope this helps.
Dushan_Gomez
Level 6
13 years ago
Ah,

At the moment I'm adding a new partition to the VS, and point that to a new disk. whenver the capacity reach 95%, but obviously I'm now running out of drive letters

and I'm using Non Symantec backup software (HP Data Protector and EMC Avamar) So I wonder if the Enterprise Vault backup can be offloaded once it is backed up.
GertjanA
Moderator
13 years ago
See:

You can then define to migrate the cabfiles to 3rd line storage (or tapes).

Check the installing and configuring manual. It has a section on "Collect and Migrate"
Rob_Wilcox1
Level 6
13 years ago
You could do some manual consolidation, and/or get some BIG amounts of disk space. Something is wrong in the design if you are adding drive letter after drive letter after drive letter.
Dushan_Gomez
Level 6
13 years ago
Rob, many thanks for the idea of "manual consolidation", so is there any KB article in doing the manual consolidation ?

I'm sorry for such a lame question becuase I need to learn about EV in my new company.
Rob_Wilcox1
Level 6
13 years ago
Unfortunately I don't know of one.. I may well write a blog about it though :)
Dushan_Gomez
Level 6
13 years ago
Cool, so please let me know about it once you publish the blog article Rob.

Thanks for the willingness to share the knowledge here for the community.
Rob_Wilcox1
Level 6
13 years ago
No problem - I will certainly let you know (sometime next week).. I've already added it to my (growing) todo list :)
LCT
Level 6
13 years ago
What we have done manual consolidation by having fast disks on the SAN and format them with GPT instead of MBR. This will depend on what OS you are using and if you are using VMWare you may be restricted. You can search on the net for MBR and GPT disk format etc, there is a Microsoft technet doc about it. For example, we are using physical servers say an IBM blades with Fast Disk (SAN) running Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise. We assgn two 5TB disks and we format it with GPT and then we copy all the closed partitions into these two disks. This will only use two letter drives. Then go into SQL and then update the Partition Entry table (in the EV Directory database) to point the closed partitions to the new location. Once this is done you can then start to decomissions the old disks or use them for something esle.
Jeff_Shotton
Level 6
13 years ago
Move some of the partitions to be hosted on the same volume once you have your new bigger disks. There is a technote on that:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH35742

Even simpler, if you don't mind the back-end data being a bit of a mess, if you can grow the old volumes then you can re-open old partition and start writing to that, but personally I wouldn't do that as I like to know approximately how old the data is in each partition.

You could also use mount points to save using drive letters, but I've never been a fan of this either because I have seen 'funnies' far too many times with this configuration. You are better off getting a huge storage device like a netapp and making it available to EV.

Also don't consider migrating the data if you are still on a version lower than 10, because when you come to reindex all the data it needs to be available, and if you are using migrations you are looking at a very long process. Upgrade to EV10 and do this afterwards.