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FLX's avatar
FLX
Level 4
7 years ago

quota based archiving in detail

Hi,

I'm unaware of some quota based archiving details. Does EV continously or only one time check the current mailbox size? Somehow, I didn't find any clear staement in the docs.

So if my Archive Task is scheduled for 6 hours, I'm assuming it only checks quota one time in a sequential procedure. According to my reports it seems true. If you administrate exchange you may know, that an mailbox size is always volatile.

To avoid an increasing mailbox for heavy users within the working hours, it would be better to run archive tasks several times instead on an long term schedule I think.

Exchange backup is snapshot based, so it would pretend pending items issues if backup is not completed prior to the first and longest arching run in the morning (Mailbox Archiving After Exchange and EV Backups fom https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Articles/Finding-the-Time-to-Archive-Mailboxes/ta-p/807162 ) EV Backups and syncs times would be spared, too.

Thanks for a short advice.

 

  • GertjanA's avatar
    GertjanA
    7 years ago

    Found:

    General info on quota based archiving

    This one backs my statement of the single run.

    single run KB

    This is archiving the mailbox to a percentage of the limit set by the Exchange administrator in Active Directory (AD).
    During a quota based archiving, running the Archiving Task makes a single pass through all mailboxes.
    Therefore, by default, a maximum of only 1000 items will be archived in any one scheduled period regardless if the task is set to run 24/7.

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  • Dan_L's avatar
    Dan_L
    Level 3
    7 years ago

    It checks each time the mailbox is processed. While this may not be the case for you specifically, that also can mean that If your archiving window is insufficient, some mailboxes may not be processed and archived back down below quota at all.

    • GertjanA's avatar
      GertjanA
      Moderator
      7 years ago

      To add to Dan's comment, you have some ways to sort of verify.

      The Mailbox Archiving Report is a good start, you can verify if all mailboxes have items archived.

      In addition, at the time of an archiving run, the MSMQ A3 queue is filled. This queue should get a number of rows which matches the number of mailboxes to be archived from that server. If A3 drops to 0 within the archiving window, you're good. If it remains then what happens is at the next run, the number is added again, and those lines not being processed in the first run, will be actioned first. There might therefor be mailboxes which will be archived only once or twice a week.

      In the performance guide (I believe) also is a query which shows the archiving rate per vaultstore. That can give you an indication also of what is happening.

      MSMQ queues are described in the Administrators guide.

      • arnoldmathias's avatar
        arnoldmathias
        Level 4
        7 years ago

        Monitor the MSMQ A5 queues every hour to check if all the mailboxes scheduled for archiving on each of the mailbox archiving server are completely archived or not.

        I believe, in your case either

        i) the archival schedule is insufficient and/or mailboxes are too large causing the A5 queues to not clear down completely

        OR

        ii) the archival policies are not setup correctly to bring down the mailbox quota limits enough such that the mailbox goes full before the next archival run

        We make use of a Powershell script to check the pending mailboxes in A5 queues every hour and to send an alert to admins in case there are items (mailboxes) still left in the A5 queue even after the archive schedule completes. That is the first indicator of a problem.

        To add to GertjanA's reply, A3 is populated only during a RunNow and A5 should be the one you need to look at. Correct me if wrong.