Decomission of EV 11 CHF4

[ShaiceMichael]

We have an EV environment that is no longer used - EV11CH4. and we are in the process of decommissioning then.

There are accounts for the users who left the organization and these accounts are marked with SID and others are active users, in total there are around 40K mailboxes.

So, can I ask for any thoughts on how I can delete several thousand archives with SID and AD objects from EV 11 and from Centra storage

Any help on this is much appreciated.

KInd regards

[GertjanA]

Hello Michael,

What are you going to do with the 'active' archives? Migrate them to Exchange? Keep them available to users?

As for deleting in bulk. It is possible to do it via SQL, but be advised that deleting archives will hammer SQL, Index- and Storage locations. As you use Centera, are you using hardware retention? If the last = yes, what is the retention. Keep in mind that if an item has not passed retention, it cannot be deleted. I strongly recommend not deleting 1000's of archives, as that will kill your EV.

I am in kind of the same boat. We're migrating archives for active users to Exchange. When all archives which can be migrated are migrated, we will shutdown EV. Then we use the BEEP system to see if we missed someone. (BEEP = user calls service desk to ask why his archive is not reachable). We have over 160000 user archives, of which 107000 could be deleted.

Check THIS forumpost. it has the SQL query described.

Note that this line SET ArchivingState = 4
WHERE ArchivingStating = 1

needs to be changed to SET ArchiveStatus = 4
WHERE ArchiveStatus = 1

Make 200% sure you are targeting the correct archive(s). If you make an error, revert the values. (i.e. set AS = 1 where AS = 4)

[ShaiceMichael]

Thanks for the update. We have migrated our environment to cloud and EV environment is no longer used. We need to delete all data from EV, including archives. Our retention policy was set for 10 years and even if we modify the policy it will apply only to newly archived items.

As we use Centra, storage retention policies are fully dependent on application settings. I think deleting it through SQL query is the only available options.

Have you trid SQL query in your enviroment and is it worked fine, kindly let me know

Kind regards

Shaice

[Prone2Typos]

@GertjanA I was shocked to read this as I know you are well veresed in the options to migrate and a project that size is quite an undertaking for an native tool migration. I know you must know that mismatching source to target is just the tip of the sliperly slope....  

I think that is a lot of "What do you need" and scope consideration here. First off, when I read this I got the impression that the archived content was not needed... In that case no migration needed. How to delete... well that depends on your needs a lot too.

I would not suggest via EV deletions either. If none if the data is truely needed I would consider (my gut says backup but backing up Centera would be an issue) and EV dependency purges personally. I would seek your storage admins guidence on deletion of the stored content (hopefully you guys have a pool set up in your case) and seek secure deletion of applicable DBs, servers, service accounts..... whatever else you want to do). 

If you need the data....or some of it.... that is a different thread.