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Archive status for orphaned archive

PoorAdmin
Level 6

We have a large number of orphaned archives. The mailboxes have been deleted but the archive status still show the archive as an active archive. Since there is no mailbox I cannot use a Zap. What other options od I have?

9 REPLIES 9

VirgilDobos
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hey!

Have a look on this article for a few options on how to handle these archives: 

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH35574

But what exactly are you trying to achieve?

--Virgil

arnoldmathias
Level 4

@PoorAdmin

An archive may have any of the following three states,

  • Available
  • Closed
  • Marked for Deletion

If you are looking from a licensing perspective, you may rather leave them as Available. From what I have been made aware, licensing only considers archives which have an associated active mailbox (i.e. mailbox exists in Exchange, and respective AD account is Enabled). It does not consider archives for shared mailboxes (where AD account is disabled), room/resource mailboxes or archives which do not have an associated active mailbox (orphan archives). You may verify this again with your implementation partner or Veritas Support/Licensing team.

There is no way to set an archive as Closed using the VAC, however, you may run a SQL query to mark its status as closed.

If the goal is to reclaim disk space, you may delete the archive using the VAC by following the technical article on deleting archives. Do make note of the these points. This would change the status to Marked for Deletion.

For me it is an incomprehension that a business application like Enterprise Vault has no automatic Workflow for this cases included. Especially for very large-scale companies. Benefits from single instance can be caught up by very old orphaned archives.

Somebody posted a solution here in the community. It is an SQL Update command, and your archive will be marked for deletion. but it seems not to be supported by veritas or veritas platinum partner.

With this infos, I could have built a workflow with my own data input..(only a few lines of powershell)

 

 

 

it's a licensing issue. If I run the following query I get archives that are still showing as active even though the mailbox and AD accounts are disabled, deleted or hidden. We are not ready to delete the archive but they are no longer actively being archived. I would like to have these marked as not active. How can I achieve this?

SELECT *

FROM ExchangeMailboxEntry

Where MbxArchivingState ='1'

AND MbxExchangeState > '0'

 

Marcde
Moderator
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Partner    VIP    Accredited

This seems to be more like wrongly handling leavers. The process should normally be (in most cases) to completeley archive a mailbox, disable archiving in EV (which should change the mbxarchivingstate flag from 1 to 2) and after this hide / delete the user and mailbox.

It seems that you forgot to disable archiving. How many are affected? hundreds or thousands? It's probably necessary to do some changes in sql to remove the orphaned entries.

PMCS GmbH & Co. KG - A Serviceware Company
www.serviceware.de

@PoorAdmin it is not too late and you may update MbxArchivingState to '2' directly using a SQL update command. Note that the difference between MbxArchivingState / MbxExchangeState is briefly discussed here by @Wayne_Humphrey. In your case, the orphaned archives should have the MbxArchivingState as '2' and MbxExchangeState as '2'. Once done, the query which you mentioned earlier should give you cleaner results.

Since your concern is with Licensing only, perhaps it is best to first understand licensing with the Veritas Pre-Sales, Veritas Licensing Team or Implementation Partner and avoid going down the SQL route to do a cleanup.

For all company leavers going ahead, you should first completely archive the mailbox, then disable mailbox archiving using the VAC.

CConsult
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

Hi pooradmin,

it will not be an licensing issue.

Only users who actively contribute data to be archived must be licensed. If a user is gone (inactive) he will not need a license.

You can however set them inactive in the database aswell, although this would not improve your license status.

I guess what I am trying to get to is how does the Veritas License Checker tool calculate licenses. When I run it there is a completely different number than what sql is giving me in terms of active archives. I'd like to reconcile.

Well am not sure if this would be the right forum to discuss a way around Licensing. The following are my 2¢ to the problem anyway as I haven't used a License Checker tool. 

From the discussion above, remember that

  • Disabled AD Accounts without a mailbox but having an EV archive do not require a license
  • A shared mailbox/resource mailbox/room mailbox has a disabled AD account and does not require a license but if the delegates to each of these archive has an active AD account, they would require a license.

You would need to gather statistics from SQL, ActiveDirectory and Exchange.

A) Run the following to collect all AD Account details using powershell on any server with AD Users & Computers.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory
Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties sid,distinguishedname,samaccountname,enabled,mail,msexchrecipienttypedetails | select sid,distinguishedname,samaccountname,enabled,mail,msexchrecipienttypedetails | export-csv .\userlist.csv -notypeinformation

B) Export all results from the ExchangeMailboxEntry table to a CSV file. Lookup the values from the LegacyMbxDN in the output to the result from A) assuming that disabled AD accounts have not been moved to a different OU.

C) Gather permissions assigned to each archive using the script given here Take the SID and lookup in userlist.csv (from A) to find the delegates to archive. Lookup the SID from this output to the output in A. and then in B. to check if the delegates have an active AD account and/or are EV enabled. If the delegates are not EV enabled, they would count as 1 additional license, or else they already are counted for along with their archive.

Results from these 3 basic queries should give you a figure close to what you see in the License Checker tool. This, I believe, is only a crude way to find out the total used licenses though, perhaps, someone can correct me if wrong. If you are able to find a better way around it, do let us know.