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Archiving Mailboxes in Exchange 2013 CU17 with EV 11.0.1

The_Dark_Knight
Level 4

Hello Vox Members,

Having to contend with an issue on site. The environment consists of 6 Mailbox Archiving Servers running EV 11.0.1 CHF5.

The Exchange targets amount to 7 Mailbox Servers. we have a 11 hr schedule archiving 22k mailboxes.

The customer has issues with the count of Mailboxes not being processed being high. On analysis noticed that the task seems to skip mailboxes. From what I understand, mailboxes are picked up in alphabetical order and processed. But the report seems to suggest that the task has skipped some mailboxes in between.

If a manual run is done (in report mode), there seems to be no issue as the task seems to process the mailbox. In one test, it so happens that the mailboxes were already in quota.

Any suggestions on how to approach this situation

 

5 REPLIES 5

GertjanA
Moderator
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Hello DK.

I assume you run quota based archiving only? I am not sure mailboxes are processed alphabetically, it depends on how they are entered in MSMQ (A5 I believe). What is the count of the A5 queue?

What is (on the task) the number of items per pass? Is it possible to lower that? Do you have 'start with items larger than' configured? I believe that if all mailboxes are processed from the MSMQ, and the task is still in schedule, a new run is executed. I am however not sure if that would reflect properly in the reports.

It might be that the archiving window is too small. Mailboxes not processed remain in the MSMQ, but the next scheduled run will add the 'mailboxes to archive' again to the queue. The remaining ones will be processed before the newly added are being processed. Saying that, you should see in the archiving reports that (as example) a mailbox which was not processed on monday, is processed on tuesday.

Regards. Gertjan

Hi,

In continuation based on the reply...

The Archiving Policies applicable in this environment is not completely homogenous. But we do have majority of the mailboxes being archived based on Quota. Also, we have the setting "Items larger than" enabled on our Gen Pop Policy

With regards to the Archiving Task settings, currently the mailbox server that is being investigated, we have the following

No. of Connections: 10

No. of Items per pass: 1000

On other servers where we do see mailboxes being missed, the settings are 10/500.

The bone of contention with the customer is the understanding that when the mailboxes are picked and put in the A5 Queue, they are picked up in alphabetical order. Yet, there are mailboxes which haven't been processed (most likely skipped). the report does not say if an attempt has failed or not. Have not checked the Event Viewer, and we will check it tomorrow. And as suggested, we will look at the report tomorrow and see if the mailboxes not processed today are picked up in the next run.

GertjanA
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Hi,

Those mailboxes might have something like 'do not archive' set on folder, or perhaps root. Not sure how to check, but should be possible to do so. I remember zapping mailboxes sometimes, and reenabling them, to make sure they get a new hidden message written.

Regards. Gertjan

Titoine31
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Hello,

Have you some specific EVentID in Enterprise Vault Event log during archiving ?

Could you try to put "No. of items per pass" at 5000 and restart your archiving task ... I must re-find the technote regarding this issue.

Regards

Antoine

@The_Dark_Knight items in A5 or any EV related MSMQ are not processed in alphabetic order but as per the time when they were added to the queue starting with the oldest. I had written a Powershell script for my environment to verify that. Let me know if you need it and will write one quickly.

That being said, as @GertjanA suggested, you may reduce the item count per pass from 500 (to say 200?) and then check if all the mailboxes are archived. In my experience, SQL maintenance also plays a major role in archiving performance and simply running the maintenance jobs regularly will drastically cut down the time taken for archiving. You may give SQL DB Fragmentation a check. Would suggest you also check if there were any Windows patches recently installed on the affected server.