Anyone archiving Exchange 2013 CU13?

[Elio_C]

Hi
Using EV 11.0.1 chf2 and maybe having some archiving performance issues, logged with support and they correctly noted Exchange 2013 CU13 is still pending support.
I just want to garner any community feedback.
Thanks

[GertjanA]

Hi EC.

I'd go to CHF5 anyway, has some fixes. We're running CU12 at the moment without issues.

CHF4 has a fix to improve performance archiving from Exchange 2013 (Journal mailbox archiving) (which is also in CHF5 obviously). Not sure when CU13 arrived, but it usually takes a few weeks before Veritas states it is supported.

[Elio_C]

Thanks Gertjan,

CU13 has been public since the 21st June, 7 weeks, and included fixes for issues we're seeing. Since deployment archiving has dropped to about 60% of the previous rate on CU12. Stable eMail beats archive performance so I had no choice to deploy it.

Lots of troubleshooting and now logged with support who advised of the compatability issue. Hence the request for community feedback.

There is no information if CU13 will be supported in EV11, maybe a CHF6. If I have to upgrade to EV12 I'll need to do hardware and SQL refreshes too so not just a quick upgrade.

Thanks again for the reponse.

[GertjanA]

wauw. Having a 60% drop is massive. I'll note that as 'no CU13 for now'. You might need to get in contact with the program manager, or perhaps the duty manager of support, to try to get a stetement on when it will be supported.

[EVSupportVet]

Hello, 

The rule of thumb for support on any O/S SP's or Exchange SP's, etc is that we have an approx 90 day grace period from date of release from the manufacturer.  

Someone asked this in our internal community recently and as of July 28th, the response was there is no solid date of when we will officially support CU13.  Just keep checking the compatiblity guide for updates.  

If performance is down by 60%, rollback to a supported CU if possible.  But from a support perspective, we cannot troubleshoot an unsupported config.  

[GertjanA]

Hi EC,

How is the performance doing? Curious te learn if any progress has been made..

[Elio_C]

Thanks Gertjan

No progress as I've been out for the last 2 weeks. I'm planning to update from CHF2 to CHF5 this week and will update the thread.

[Elio_C]

Thanks EVSupportVet

The 90 days is coming up in around 2 weeks so hopefully there will be a formal response soon.

CU13 was deployed to address specific mail-related issues so roll-back is not an option, email availability beats archiving rate every time.

[Elio_C]

CHF5 doesn't appear to have made a difference.

The good news is that Exchange 2013 CU13 was added to the compatibility chart on the 9th September. I've opened a case to investigate.

[GertjanA]

How ironic. Anyway, keep us posted of the progress please. There might be a trick or two we need....

[Elio_C]

Support have been looking at this and a suggestion was to change the Exchange Connection Points from my site aware load balanced address to a single Exchange 2013 server.

Too early to say for sure but this appears to have made a difference to the item/volume of archived data.

Odd that the same change has made a difference on my EV11.0.1 CHF2 (unsupported for Exchange 2013 CU13) sites too.

More updates as I get them.

[GertjanA]

Hello again,

That's good. Can you explain what exactly has been done? Did you create a hosts file pointing to 1 exchange server? How exactly is that configured?

Any other settings that have been changed?

Thanks.

[Elio_C]

In the VAC under domain properties I changed the single NLB address pointing to 8 Exchange 2013 servers across the primary/secondary sites (4 in each, mailboxes can be housed in either but EV only archives from primary site) to the FQDN of a single Exchange server in the primary site.

To provide some resilience I am going to get a VIP setup for only the 4 Exchange servers in the primary site (the site where EV is based). Hopefully this will work just as well and remove the single point of failure.

Nothing else changed for this test.

Not quite sure this has resolved this yet but looking like CU13 alone is not an issue.

More updates as I get them.

[GertjanA]

Hello ECW,

Can you indicate exactly what you entered? Instead of using the NLB address, did you enter the FQDN of a CAS server, or of a mailbox server hosting the Journal mailboxes? And, what is a VIP?

Thanks!

GJ

[Elio_C]

Hi Gertjan, apologies for the confusion

I used the FQDN of a single Exchange 2013 multi-role (CAS/Mailbox) server.

VIP=Virtual IP address. In my case a DNS A record for the 2 NLB addresses covering Primary and DR Exchnage CAS role servers.

This is only Mailbox not Journal archiving.