Forum Discussion

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 T...
  • 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.

GertjanA's avatar
GertjanA
Moderator

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.

  • GertjanA's avatar
    GertjanA
    Moderator
    7 years ago

    Arnold, you're right. My mistake. apologies for confusion.

    • FLX's avatar
      FLX
      Level 4
      7 years ago

      My archiving process is not insufficent, normally my MSMQ Messagecount is (under 5 ) empty. Easy to monitor with Get-MsmqQueue | where {$_.messagecount -gt 0} | select queuename, messagecount

      Back to my inital question: while archiving, all mailboxes which will be processed will be stored once in A5 Queue. If mailbox is has been finished, mailbox is not under quota surveilance (because quota based archiving is an real-time process due to the very volative mailbox sizes).

      In this use case, you have to start severall Tasks instead of running a task for a long time, I think. Am I right?

      • GertjanA's avatar
        GertjanA
        Moderator
        7 years ago

        Hello FLX,

        Not exactly I believe. When a task starts, it puts the items in the A5 queue, and starts processing. When finished procesing all mailboxes, I believe it does not do a 2nd run, but waits for the taskschedule to initiate the next run.

        You might want to investigate the average time it takes for the task to finish, and then adjust the schedule to run a few periods. (i.e run from 20:00 to 00:00, then from 02:00 to 06:00, then from 08:00 to 12:00 then from 14:00 to 18:00

        I'll check to see if I can find something on this.