Enterprise Evault Good How To docs

[ph1llies05]

Hi All,

I've just been handed over the duties of getting our Evault system functional, so we can start archiving our Exchange data.  Our system was setup and configured by another admin, whom is no longer with us,  to archive all of our Lotus Notes data prior to migrating to Exchange and Journal our Exchange messages.  Journaling of Exchange data has been up and running for about a year now, our users currently access the Notes archived data from the Outlook Evault addins and appears to work fine.  We now  need to configure EV to start archiving our Exchange data to get the sizes of our user mailboxes down.  If anyone could point me to any helpful documents or how to's, I will gladly appreciate it.  Also, if you could point me in the right direction for configuring backup schedules with commvault.  Any help would be appreciated thanks. 

[JesusWept3]

Here's a good starting point
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/hi-i-am-new-ev

But as i've suggested before to other people, if you're new to EV, beg your management for training, because being thrown in the deepend with Enterprise Vault is a really difficult task and don't envy anyone in your position

[ph1llies05]

Thanks for the post JesusWept2, I actually starting going through the modules for information.  I wish I could go to training, but we are really in a chrunch to get our mailboxes down on our Exchange storage groups as we are getting close to running out of space.  I was able to configure a provisioning group, desktop, and mailbox policies to archive my mailbox and a few other users.  I really need to find a good best practices document for backups as I don't want to leave the option to remove data from Exchange immediately after being archived. 

Question:

I have a vault store open that I believe contains all our Journaled messages for over the pass year and has grown to about 700+ GB's.  I would like to close this partition and start journaling to a new vault store.  What size is recommended for  stores before closing and if I decide to close it, will i have any type of performance hits.?

I would like to also have our mailbox archives go to another vault store, but from what I can tell majority of our users have been enabled to point to the vault store I mentioned above.  Is there a way to create another mailbox vault store and force the archive task to use the new store?

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Well in that scenario of 700GB+ in a single vault store, my advice wouldn't be to create a new vault store, but simple to create a new partition in that vault store and have it go to a new location.

The fact is that a Vault Store is a logical container, where as the Vault Store Partition that resides in the vault store is a physical location, such as an NTFS drive, or on a netapp, centera, CIFS, etc etc.

Although you could create a new vault store to go to a new location, it would actually be the partition that would go to the new storage, which could just as easily be accomplished by closing down your large vault store partiition and creating a new partition which is open.

As for seperating out the users from the journal mailbox.
If you wanted to do this, you would have to create a new vault store, and a new partition as you know, and then you would have to use Move Archive to move the journal archive in to the new vault store, or you would have to use move archive to move all the user archives out in to the new vault store.

However it wouldn't really be necessary as there wouldn't be any benefit to keeping your journal data and your user data seperate.

This document may help regarding best practices for Backups
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/enterprise-vault-backups-best-practice

[ph1llies05]

Thanks for clearing up creating a new Vault Store and Vault store partition the,  I was told that it isn't recommended to have journaled messages and user archived data going to the same vault store partition.  If there isn't any benefit in separating the two, would you suggest I create a new Vault Store Partition in the same Vault Store as the 700GB and close out that partition, so backups would be smaller and faster.  Is it safe to say that backups for closed partitions shouldn't't be as frequent as any open partitions?

Thanks for the backup document, I will definitely read through it.  I appreciate your responses on my post.