Adding additional EV servers - best practices

[Anon_Man]

Hi - hope someone can help. We have a 6 year old EV 8.0 SP3 (shortly to be SP4) server. quad Xeon 2.7GHz, 4GB RAM, Win2k3 Standard. This was state of the art hardware in its day, but is now showing signs of age. We are planning to build a new server and move the existing server to new hardware, following technote 293911. I also aim to build additional servers to take some of the load off a single server. This is a similar question to biosphere's question recently, but I don't want to hijack his thread and my environment is slightly different.. Link to biosphere's thread: http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/adding-new-ev-servers-offload-existing We have 6 Exchange 2007 archiving tasks and 4 Exchange 2003 archiving tasks. The Exchange 2003 tasks won't be around within a few weeks as the migration from E2k3 to E2k7 completes. Archiving runs weekdays 9am to 5pm and all weekend for the Exchange servers with the worst space issues. Other servers just run evenings and weekends, although backups pretty much rules out any archiving until the weekend. SQL is on a separate dedicated VM. Backups start at 5:30pm. Active partition: daily, weekly and monthly full Indexing: daily incremental, weekly & monthly full Closed partitions: Once every 6 months. Additionally we are considering a solution for replicating data to another datacentre using either DoubleTake or NearSync, but I've started a separate thread for that bit to avoid confusing things furher. If I move some of the archiving and indexing tasks to the new server and reprovision the users (and therefore split the archiving load), does that require: 1. A new store? 2. Moving some of the archives to the new store? 3. These clients to retrieve from the new server? Ideally, I'd like to keep it as simple as possible and maintain a single store and not have to reconfigure any client settings (e.g. local intranet zone settings etc). Hope someone can help!!! Thanks

[TonySterling]

First, I would recommend consulting a SYMC partner to aid you with this.  They could take a look at your environment and give you a proper solution design and give you estimates for your future storage needs.

Now for your post, it sounds like you have one EV server and if you are wanting to move the load off of it to another server you add to your environment then yes, you will need to create a new vault store and move the associated archive from the existing store to the new.  This can be done with Move Archive or third party tools.

Oh, and also kudo's for not hijacking the other thread!!  :)

Cheers,

[Liam_Finn1]

If you have seperate archives for each task then you can just move the vaults from server to server following the below process

There's actually an article on this that gives you the detailed steps:

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/273271.htm

The only difference in EV8, of course, is that you're putting the stores in backup mode and not utilizing the registry keys that are specified.  Otherwise, everything else should remain the same.

[Anon_Man]

Thanks for the advice Tony.

Yes, there is a single EV server at present.  I'm wary about relying on the move archive feature especially given that biosphere had such problems. 

[MirrorSphere]

You need to also consider if you do move the Vault Store as scanner suggests that this will not move the indexes associated with these archives.

You will also need to copy / robocopy the indexes across and ensure you update the tables in the database to reflect the Indexing service.

Best practice is Local Archiving Task talking to Local Storage Service with Local indexes and Indexing Service.

[Anon_Man]

We presently have a single vault store, so (sadly) I don't think we can simply move the partitions to the new server.

Still slightly confused!  If I reprovision users from certain Exchange servers to use a new vault store on the new server, do I need to move the archives first?

Presently all clients have the following in the local intranet zone (set through GP):
hostname
vault.domain.com

So presumably I'd need to change this to:
hostname
vault.domain.com
hostname2
vault2.domain.com

If all clients had all of these in their local intranet zone settings, this would mean I wouldn't need to worry about which EV server/store they were on.

[Anon_Man]

Thanks EV-ASSIST.
Good point. Alas, as we have a single vault store, I don't see that as an option anyway.

We do plan to have local archiving, storage and indexes.

[MirrorSphere]

Yes you will need to move the archive first as it will contine to write to where the archive is located otherwise and just simply add the new server name to the GPO.

Personally I think you need to do some analysis on your EV Peforemance to see how much needs to be processed per day.  From here you will able to ascertain how many servers you need.  It might be that you take this opportunity to migrate the environment to VMWare.

[Anon_Man]

Okay, so we move all the archives from a particular Exchange server to the new server/store. When every archive for that Exchange server has been moved, we reprovision the users on that server to use the new store. 

Performance-wise, we have been hit because we migrated around 3TB and 3000 users of mail data from Notes to Exchange from an recently acquired company. This has had quite an impact on archiving and retrieval perfomance.

Personally, I'd like to see Symantec develop a way of separating vault retrieval/search from archiving.  We could then have a server dedicated to retrieval/search and have the archiving going on elsewhere. Users generally don't care too much how long archiving takes, but kick up a stink if retrieval, restore or search takes more than a few seconds.

[Liam_Finn1]

The other option is to leave all the data where it is today if it is performing OK and just move all archiving to the new server. Or move all the old process over to the new server by performing a data only DR and then continue archiving from the old server.

This way you get the performance to offer the data up to the users but use the older server to archive to a new vault

[MirrorSphere]

Moving the archiving tasks to the new server would not be best practice as you would have Archiving Tasks speaking to a remote storage service on another server that handles that Vault Store.

Do you have an even split of mailboxes across your Exchange Servers?

If so this is what I would probably do.

Create another EV Server and join it to the EV Site.
Have each EV Server target three Exchange Servers to balance out the load.
Create another local Vault Store and Indexing Service on this additional Server.
Ensure in the Vault Admin console on the Exchange Object that any newly enabled mailboxes go to the correct corresponding Vault Store and Indexing Service.
Ensure that you have configured the Fingerprint database so that you will get SIS across your Vault Stores and partitions on multiple EV Servers.
For any that had already had an archive in the original vault store then use the 'Move Archive' tool to take it across to the correct Vault Store.

Hope this helps.
 

[Anon_Man]

Thanks for all the responses so far - it's been a big help. Fortunately the scheduled work got put back a week for reasons outside of my control, so I have a little longer to plan it all out now.

I'm assuming it would it make sense to to keep the new vault store in the same vault store group (to keep SIS)?

I'm a little concerned about how long moving the archives is going to take.  With several TB and thousands of archives stored on fairly slow SAN on the old server, even taking into account the 45% improvement (source : EV Performance Guide) in speed from the orignal ingest, it's still going to take months and months to move this data... 

One last question - I'm assuming that while the archive is being moved from one store to another, there could be some disruption to item retrieval until shortcuts are updated within the Exchange mailbox.

[MirrorSphere]

Have you read through the Move Archive Whitepaper?

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/351473.htm

[Anon_Man]

Didn't know the whitepaper existed! Thanks, have read it now. Seems pretty good.

[Anon_Man]

Update:
New EV server installed, new store created.  Thanks for all the advice from everyone on here. Moving archives threw up errors at first, but I've just found out there's a hotfix for this problem with move archive, so hopefully that will fix it.

GPO has updated all clients to add the new hostname and alias to local intranet zone.  Would it be okay to delete some of the archiving tasks from the old EV server and recreate them on the new server and move the archives for individual users across afterwards?  Obviously this means that older items would be within the old vault store and newer items within the new store, but I don't see why this wouldn't work.

The main reason I'd like to do this approach is that it would instantly transfer some of the load off the old EV server on to the new one.

[Anon_Man]

Can anyone advise on the moving of the archiving tasks???

[GertjanA]

Hello Anon_Man.

Moving archiving task should be relatively easy.

Set the task in report mode, restart it and keep it running untill the corresponding MSMQs are empty.

Stop the task.

Create new task on 2nd server, configure to handle the server it needs to handle, start it.
The old task now should not have a target listed.
When all is well, delete the old task.

[Anon_Man]

Hi
Thanks for the reply.

I just wanted to know do I move the archives for that Exchange server before moving the archiving task, or after it?  Or doesn't it matter?

[Nick_White · Accepted solution]

The Archives are tied to the storage service rather than the Archiving task which is tied to the Exchange server. Therefore you shouldn't need to do anything after moving the Archiving task, as the task that points at the Exchange server will continue to process all of the mailboxes on that server and the archived items will be stored by the storage service that is responsible for the Vault Store that the Archive is in

[Anon_Man]

Excellent - that confirms what I thought.
Many thanks Nick.