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Enterprise Vault / Discovery Accelerator and VMWare ESX

Matthew_Kimler
Level 5

Our organization uses a 100% VMWare environment. For the most part, this has worked quite well, but I have noticed that certain portions of the Enterprise Vault roles do not function well in a virtual environment. The current configuration is below. All servers are Windows 2003 SP3 32-bit. The roles and general virtual configuration is listed. Each EV# is it's own server. The environment is approximately 5000 users. We have gone through the performance guide several times and have made a good amount of the recommendations as applicable.

Servers:
EV1 - Mailbox Archiving
4 procs (these 4 cores have been dedicated in VMWare for this virtual machine), 4 GB RAM, 5 index locations each on it's own LUN on NetApp, Vault Cache on dedicated drive on NetApp

EV2 - Journal Archiving
4 procs, 4 GB RAM, 1 index location on NetApp

EV3 - Directory and PST Location (Locating only, no collection or importing)
2 procs, 4 GB RAM

EV4 - Discovery Accelerator
2 procs, 4 GB ram

EV5 - SQL 2005 32-bit
4 procs, 4 GBs, dedicated drives for Logs and Data (seperated)


Current Issues:
- EV1 is completely running non-stop 100% all four procs 24 hours a day. Indexing issues that require restarting of services approximately 2-3 times per week.

- EV4 and EV5 - The enabling of analytics throws all four processors on EV5 to 100%. The creation of full text XML files from this causes extreme performance hits. Estimated time to complete 100,000 items for analytics is 8.4 hours (possibly longer).


Questions:
- Does anyone have a similar size environment and uses VMWare?
- Has anyone been able to enable analytics successfully within a VMware environment? How large was the case? Did you have the same problem with the full text searching?
- I would love to get a definitive answer on VMWare environment and Enterprise Vault. I only can find general recommendations but not a specific, "hey, with this number of mailboxes you will have this much lost in a VMWare environment" statement.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

TonySterling
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified
That seems a bit slow.  I know you have you seen the performance guide
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/312319.htm

but have you seen the best practice guide?
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Discovery_Accelerator_Module/326055.pdf


Also, you are on EV and DA 8.0 sp2, right?
Compatability table:
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Exchange_Mailbox_Archiving_Unit/276547.pdf

View solution in original post

7 REPLIES 7

Manny_E
Not applicable
Employee Accredited
It's not like EV Mailbox Archiving to run at 100% all day, especially outside the schedule of your Archive Runs. What is the Archive Run schedule like? Also, what are the top 3 processes running on EV1 eating up all that CPU?

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
 For your SQL for the DA systems it is recommended 8GB when using analytics. Analytics is going to be a memory hungry horse on your SQL that's why it is recommended so much memory and also that the SQL database for DA should be on it's own SQL server not a shared SQL server

For mailbox archiving in a VM environment I have seen some people reporting up to a 50% throughput decrease and the same goes for Journaling.

Another think to measure is the disk transfers at the time of Archiving and also analytics because you may not have assigned enough spindles to meet the required IOPS to disk. This can cause you so many issues like this because the disk Queues get very large because of paging and indexing

Matthew_Kimler
Level 5

For EV1, the top two processes are StorageCrawler and RetrievalTask. The Systems is the third for the most part that keeps fluctuating in the list. MigratorService and IndexServer is in the top 5 to 10 mostly but it fluctuating.

The schedule for archiving is basically from 4 PM to 4 AM for mailboxes.

As for the SQL server, the server does host both the DA databases and the standard EV databases. I was incorrect in the memory count, it's actually been giving 16 GBs of RAM. Again, this is a virtual machine.

Are there particular disk transfers that would be best to look at to get a better idea on the issue?

Thanks for all of your help thus far.



 

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
 Lok at the disk transfers and the disk Queue's . If the transfers are high and the queues are also high that indicates that the disks are not able to keep up with the load being placed on them and adding more spindles wii help this

If your mailbox archiving is scheduled from 4pm to 4am and it is still running after that time then you need to open a support call because it shuld terminate when the window for the run has expired

Seeing as on EV 1 the high usage tasks are storage crawler and retrievaltas it shows that it is busy retrieving data from storage. The IndexServer is the service but if it was writing to the index you would see IndexBroker doing a lot of work. 

How many users do you have on this system and how many disks are assigned to each LUN and in what configuration (raid 5, raid 10)

Matthew_Kimler
Level 5
We discoverd that the issue was with the MSMQ creating a tremendous amount of I/O activity on a backend storage solution that was overworked. We relocated this to a new drive on a different SAN and now EV01 is extremely much more responsive. I believe that this is the issue that was causing us so many problems.

For analytics, we have created a new SQL 2008 server to see how that works with analytics. While it no longer causes a high amount of CPU utilization, the overall analytics process is extremely slow. Enabling analytics for approximately 1 million items took about a week to get to 100%. Is that normal?

Thanks for all of your help guys.

Matt

TonySterling
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified
That seems a bit slow.  I know you have you seen the performance guide
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/312319.htm

but have you seen the best practice guide?
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Discovery_Accelerator_Module/326055.pdf


Also, you are on EV and DA 8.0 sp2, right?
Compatability table:
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Exchange_Mailbox_Archiving_Unit/276547.pdf

Matthew_Kimler
Level 5

Yeah, we are on 8.0 SP2 and also have implemented a hotfix for Discovery Accelerator because of a scheduled search issue that exists.

I will check those out and see if I can find something else that I am missing.