Managing Mailbox Moves within Enterprise Vault Archiving Environments

[Turls]

Document Overview

Introduction

This best practice document discusses the operational issues when managing an EV environment where mailboxes are moved between Exchange servers. There are various ways to deal with this situation and considerations that need to be taken into account before selecting each method.

Scope of Document

This document is concerned with the mailbox moves within a Microsoft Exchange environment (version independent) and is not relevant to a Domino environment.

Target Audience

This document is aimed at customers, consultants and support staff and it is assumed the reader has a good understanding about the architecture and operational aspects of an Enterprise Vault server, Microsoft Exchange as well as Active Directory terminology.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the contribution that other individuals made towards making this a successful and informative document. I am most grateful to a number of customers who provided their feedback and comments about the real world usage of EV. Also other contributions and feedback came from the following teams; technical product management, technical field enablement, engineering, development and the performance team. Thanks to them all.

Enterprise Vault Component Review

Before getting into detail about how to manage mailbox moves within an EV environment it’s worth spending a little bit of time reviewing the various components and configuration types that occur within typical EV environments.

EV Directory All configuration information for Enterprise Vault is stored within a SQL Server database with a default name of EnterpriseVaultDirectory. The Directory Service is used to access this database and all information that it contains.

EV Site A Site comprises one or more Enterprise Vault servers running one or more Enterprise Vault services and tasks to archive items from specified targets (Microsoft Exchange Servers). A Site also contains a collection of Vault Stores, archiving policies that define how and when items are to be archived, and Retention categories that define how long items are to be stored before being deleted. An Enterprise Vault Site is located in an Enterprise Vault Directory on one or more Enterprise Vault servers.

EV Server An EV server is contained within an EV Site which is in turn part of the overall Enterprise vault directory

Exchange Archive Task The mailbox archiving task collects the items that are to be archived and passes them on to the Storage Service. When the Storage Service has safely stored an item, the archiving task deletes the original, if applicable, and creates a shortcut for it, if specified. Each enabled Exchange Server will have one Archiving Task assigned to it. When Enterprise Vault archives an item, the EV Directory database is accessed to find out where the required archive is.

Storage Service The Storage Service accepts items for archiving from the archiving tasks. If possible, it generates a text or HTML version of each item, which the Indexing Service uses to compile indexing data for the item. The Storage Service compresses and stores the items (and the text or HTML versions) in the appropriate archives.

Index On instruction from the Storage Service, the Indexing Service indexes items as they are archived. It uses the AltaVista® Search technology to create and store indexing data about each item. There is one index for each archive, when users search the archives the index files are used to find the relevant items but the items are then retrieved from the Vault Store.

Vault Store A Vault Store consists of an SQL database and either a single or multiple partitions which define the physical location of the storage where the archived data is stored. When an item is archived, metadata is written to the database and this identifies who has access to the archived item and where the item is stored within the Vault Store.

User Archive A user archive is associated to an Exchange mailbox and is created when a mailbox is enabled for archiving, the user archive has permissions assigned and determines the level of access to the users’ archived data (typically this is synchronised from the mailbox). ). In earlier releases of EV this object has also been called a User Vault ; some people still use this expression to describe the user archive.

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[shiba_patra]

Dear Swathi,

Really this is a gr8 doc and helpful 4 me.....

Regards,
Shiva....