Configure vault store groups when using multiple EV components (FSA, exchange, sharepoint, etc.)

[Nate_D1]

This is a bit of a design question around VSGs:

We have been running EV for exchange for a couple years, its a fairly mature environment but we are now adding FSA to the mix as well. This brings up the question of vault stores and store groups. I know that a Vault Store Group is the boundary for SIS parts. This makes me think adding an FSA store into my existing VSG might gain us some SIS advantage, but I have also read about having FSA having their own vault store groups, so that if I ever need to split my EV environment into multiple servers (its all on a single server now) then it will be less painful.

Does the community have any thoughts or experience with this? I am sure there are many factors to this equation but any personal experience or opinions are great!

Thanks

[GertjanA · Accepted solution]

Hello Nate,

If your Fileservers are not too big, and especially not to complicated configured (rights and permission wise) I would add a 2nd server for FSA. Especially in the beginning, you might be archiving lot of big unused files, overloading the server, slowing down your mail-archiving.

In the environment I am in (which is very large), adding FSA slowed down EV to a crawl. This was due to the permissions etc being stored in the directory database. having many custom groups, specialized permissions etc proved not good. It was advised to setup a seperate ev-site (ie seperate directory database etc) for FSA only.

Also take in acount expiry (if any). Sharing items between mail and FSA might prove that expiry does not actually delete data, because it is still shared one way or the other.

My personal choice would be, in a small environment to setup a seperate server for FSA only, in it's own VSG, share within Group.

[Nate_D1]

Thank you GertjanA, that is something for us to think about. I am testing it against a small portion of a file server and already it is having big impacts on performance for the file server and the EV server. I think splitting off FSA to its own EV server would be beneficial if this keeps up!