Best practice: Maximum number of Journal Tasks per EV Server

[Dani_Schwarz]

We need to redesign our Journal infrastructure due to new regulations. In the past we had three Journal mailboxes and three Journal tasks. In the new setup we will have around fifty (!!!) Journal mailboxes and tasks.

I already reconfigured our LAB environment (almost no mail flow) and detected that my EV services always stop automatically due to low virtual memory after a short time. I also figured out that starting less Journal tasks will solve my issue. The EV services keep running. It currently looks like I can have around fifteen Journal tasks running at the same time on my EV server.

Current LAB infrastructure (one virtual EV Journal server)
CPU: 4 Cores
Memory: 4 GB (more doesn't make sence on 32-bit)
OS: Windows 2003 SP2
EV: 9.0.2

I'm currently thinking about adding additional EV servers to my EV Journal site. But how many servers will be needed to fulfil the new design? Does anyone have experience with such setups? Does anyone has a kind of calculation sheet where I can calculate the amount of servers needed to fulfil my needs?

[AndrewB]

how many exchange journaling servers are you going to have? unless it's 50 with one journal mailbox on each exchange server then i dont see why you would need SO many tasks.

it really sounds like you would benefit from professional services to assess and correctly size EV for your new journaling requirements. we have the experience and special tools for estimating and calculating exactly what you're asking. please feel free to contact me if that's something you think you might be interested in.

[GertjanA]

I've seen an environment the following:

120 journal mailboxes, spread over 2 (soon to be 4) exchange servers

4 journal archiving ev servers.

about 10 tasks per server, each having about 3 to 8 (spread the load sort of) target mailboxes.

average amount of mail per day being archived 900.000 to 1.000.000 (yes per day).

during the week the number of items in the journalmailbox goes up to something like 25000, but after the weekend, the number of items is below 100.

[Dani_Schwarz]

I see. Exchange comes into the game as well.

Currently we have 3 Exchange 2010 mailbox servers in place and only one EV journal server. All journal mailboxes are hosted in separate Exchange databases for Journaling (other database limits applied than for personal mailboxes). Currently we have two Exchange journal databases to host these fifty journal mailboxes.

A reduction of Journal Tasks (Vault Stores, Journal mailboxes) in our current setup is not possible since we have to segregate the journal data...

I also could detect that each journal task is using around 130 MB of virtual memory. If I multiply this with the amount of journal tasks I would need around 8 GB of virtual memory. Back to physical memory (virtual memory should be 1.5 times of physical memory) I would need around 5 GB RAM only for the journal tasks to start. Since I only have a Windows 2003 server I would need to install two additional servers within the EV Journal site to handle all fifty journal tasks to be on the save side.

Another option I see...
What about going forward and upgrade Windows to Windows 2008 (64-bit)? The EV version 9.0.2 is not supporting 64-bit mode. Does it make sence to upgrade windows to use the upper memory for windows processes?

[GertjanA]

We run EV on W2008x64. with 32Gb ram.

however, what you will see is that the journal tasks 'take turn' when processing. You can tweak with number of connections, and items to archive, but if you have 50 journal mailboxes, I would suggest to setup an additional ev journal archiving server, and spread the load. On the other hand, it also depends on the amount of mails coming into the journalmailboxes.

is that 10.000's, 100.000's or 1.000.000's?

if 'low' (in my view lower than 1.000.000), it might be that EV catches up during the night, all depending on your backup schedule ofcourse.

I checked 1 server, and it runs 13 JournalTask.exe *32 processes, each having around 100MB memory, but CPU-usage is switching from 0 to 12%. Do you monitor your journalmailboxes for number of items? If that remains on acceptable level, I'd monitor to see if the system can keep up.

[Dani_Schwarz · Accepted solution]

After increasing the pagefile size (1 GB additional) I could start more Journal tasks. But on a Windows 2003 system it does not make sense to have more than 4 GB RAM. Only increasing the pagefile is not really good for the performance.

An update to Windows 2008 doesn't make sense as well. As long as EV is not able to run in 64 bit mode it cannot use more than 4 GB of memory.

So I will setup additional Journaling servers to handle all this additional load.