Enterprise Vault 7 and Enterprise Vault 2007 Indexing

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the contribution and efforts that other individuals and the authors of previously written documents have made making this a successful and informative document. I am extremely grateful to our developers and product manager who provided their feedback and comments. Additional contributions and feedback came from the following teams; Technical Product Management, Technical Field Enablement, Customer Support, and the Performance team, thanks to them all.

Target Audience

This document is aimed at Customers, Consultants and Support Staff and it is assumed that the reader has a thorough understanding of the architecture and operational aspects of Enterprise Vault version 7 and above.

Overview

In order to provide search functionality, Enterprise Vault creates indexes of the items it archives. These indexes are created using the AltaVista search engine and are placed on a Storage device to be accessed by the various Enterprise Vault search applications. (I.e. CA, DA, WebApp)

Introduction

The intent of the document is to assist you in the configuration of your Indexes to provide a stable and efficient system. The focus of the document will be from a perspective of someone that will be doing Accelerator searches. CA and DA are both Index intensive during their searches. The Best Practice recommendations in this document will allow you to configuring and manage your Enterprise Vault Indexes for maximum performance and reliability.

The first recommendation that we can make is to get to EV 2007 ASAP! There have been a number of index enhancements introduced in EV 7 and even more in EV 2007. The next section covers these.

Background to Index Volume marked as ‘Failed’

In this document you will see mention of an Index Volume being marked as ‘Failed’. Enterprise Vault will mark an Index Volume as ‘Failed’ when a serious error whilst processing the index occurs that EV feels requires attention.

When an index Volume is marked as ‘Failed’ it cannot be searched or updated. This is to prevent any further changes to the indexes or potentially incorrect search results being returned.

Using IndexVolumeReplay an index volume can be ‘updated’ which means that Enterprise Vault will try again to process any outstanding requests to add or delete items from the index. IndexVolumeReplay is discussed in greater detail in the Index Monitoring section.

When an index has been marked as Failed it does not mean that there is a physical issue with the index and certainly does not mean the index is corrupt. It simply may need to be Updated once the underlying issue is corrected.

To read the complete article, download the PDF.