2010 archiving

[Sortid]

Hi,

Not sure if this has been answered already...

We have 5 Exch2003 servers and one EV server 2007SP6.  Each night one of these servers is archived.  Our plan is to move to Exch2010 and EV9.  They have designed the new environment with 2xExch2010 servers with 8 active databases all in one DAG - each server will host 4 active databases and have replicas for the others. 

Am I right in thinking that although each server must be registered in EV, the actual archiving is at a DAG level so only one EV server can actively archive the DAG at anyone time?  This would mean we go from archiving 1/5 of the organisation every night in the current set up to the entire organisation every night, and we cannot implement a second EV server as there is only one DAG.  Sounds like we will run into performance issues....unless it remembers where it stopped and continues on the next night...

Make sense?

Thanks.

[WiTSend]

Each Exchange mailbox server will have an archive task.  EV will archive the active database from which ever Exchange server is currently hosting it.  You would be archiving across all the users on the active databases each night.  One method to ensure a fairly consistent archiving would be to lower the number of items archived per pass.  This would allow the archiving task to connect to more (or all) of the mailboxes and then if there is additional time in the archiving window it would cycle through them again until the archiving window closes. 

Also, if you look at it logically, whether you are archiving 1/5 of the mailboxes every night (thus archiving 5 days worth of email) or archiving all mailboxes each night (1 day of email) the resulting number of items archived would be essentially the same.

[Ameen]

I agree with Maxwits, you should go for EV 9 and have EV archive task created for all Mailbox Servers.

Ameen.