EV Consolidation Strategy

[benorb]

I'm currently managing 5 invididual EV servers for 5 Exchange servers that all fall under the same forest root.

I've brought each of these servers up to 10.0.4 and resolved a number of issues that were presenting themselves. Now that everything is running as expected and there are no problems, I'd like to move to EV 11. I've been trying to find resource for this online, but have come up short. I have following questions:

• I'd like to build new servers running EV 11, so how can I migrate all the data to the new servers?
• I'd like to have a shared directory server, which should make management of EV more straightforward. How can I migrate the servers to come under the same umbrella?

[AndrewB]

hi benorb, are you doing mailbox archiving, journaling, or perhaps both? it's definitely possible but this would be a fairly involved process as you actually will have to do 4 migrations to eventually consolodate everything under one EV directory. there are also a lot of considerations to be made - especially if the 5 exchange servers are in different locations.

this is something we do for our customers all the time and in most cases, requires a special migration tool. if you'd like to PM me your contact info i'd be happy to discuss in more detail.

[WiTSend]

Are you saying that each EV server has it own' separate Directory DB?  If so you'll need to engage a consulting partner to assist in a major migration.

If, however, you just have 5 EV servers all attached to the same Directory DB you can have any or all of the EV servers run the Directory Service.  It actually helps in that a server can talk directly to SQL without having to go through another EV server.  Anything you do on one EV server (in the Admin console) will be updated to all the other EV servers since they all read from a single SQL db.

[GabeV]

Hi benorb,

When you said: "I'd like to have a shared directory server, which should make management of EV more straightforward" are you saying that you have 5 EV servers with a Enterprise Vault Directory database for each server, i.e. 5 different EV sites? If that's the case you could use move archive; however, as WiTSend recommended, it would be better to have a consulting partner on site to assist you with this project.

[benorb]

Thanks for your replies.

Currently mostly using EV for journaling and some limited mailbox archiving. The intention is to continue this and import a bunch of PSTs and turn on mailbox archiving.

We currently have Exchange in each location, hence having an EV server for journaling in each location. As such, each EV server does indeed have it's own directory DB. 

Based on your recommendations, I think it would be best to upgrade to EV11 now with 5 new EV servers and migrate from the existing 10.0.4 servers. We are looking to consolidate Exchange later in the year, which is when we will have to consolidate EV. At that point it seems like professional services would be the way forward.

So for migrating to new EV 11 servers, is it a case of using the migration wizard? If so, how about the EV data stores, can they be moved to new storage fairly easily?

[GertjanA]

Hello,

Upgrading EV10 to 11 and moving to new hardware. See admin-guide for buildig block config.

You might also think about moving the current EV10 to new hardware, then upgrade to 11.

For consolidation, I suggest you look at the 3rd party tooling Archive Shuttle, perhaps TransVault.

That would be easier then transferring the actual data.

[WiTSend]

The migration wizard is the easiest way to go to migrate to new hardware.  Move the existing vault store and indexes to new storage is generally pretty easy, essentially a file copy.