Hello David,
Thanks! I assume you use EV11.x? Target Address rewriting is used to change the Journal Enveloppe to define into which archive it goes right? We use EV12.3, which has a different functionality (much easier). In 12.2, the following was introduced. Instead of using adress rewriting, you define the receiving target email-address. Then in EV, you define which archives (yes multiple archives) should get the message. In my environment, I have 5 EV SMTP Archiving servers, and a hardware Load balancer between Exchange and EV. In EV Console, Targets, SMTP, Manual Targets. first Target Email Address = JNL02y@domain.com. On the properties of that address, there is a tab called Archives. I have defined 5 Vault Stores with each having a partition on a storage device with hardware retention of 2 years.On that tab, I have 5 archives defined. 1 2 year archive per Vault Store. Then, no matter where the message arrives, it gets archived into the archive local to the SMTP archiving server. This allows moving messages from server A to server B, and get processed without issues (tested and verified!).The same for the other retention periods I have.
As for Target rewriting, that rewrites the initial journal address (jnl02y) to something like jnl02y_srv1, or jnl02y_srv2 etc (right?). This indicates the archive where the item needs to go. I GUESS (!! but that hopefully gets confirmed by others) that if you move a rewritten item to another server, it still will go into the archive belonging to the rewrite, but that does mean there will be traffic between the EV servers themselves. (MSMQ outgoing queues?). This also implies that if server 2 is down, these messages will/can not be archived, because the target EV server is not available.
If you are able to use the 'new' way of using SMTP archiving, that would ease your life a lot. For instance, shutting down one server causes no issues, as the other 4 just pick up the messages.(the LB will see 1 server down, and routes the messages to the remaining ones)
I hope someone else (possibly from VRTS) can confirm above.