Enterprise Vault 10 and Exchange 2010 Environment

[ZTag]

We are planning to have 1 EV site with 4 EV servers in order to Archive more than 13000 mailboxes in our Exchange 2010 environment. Our Exchange environment consists of 2 Mailbox servers and the plan of EV servers which i am thinking of putting in place is given below:

1. SQL cluster creation to make the environment high available with EVServer A and EVServer B and create one single database on it for the whole EV environment. Create EV Cluster on the same two servers EVServer A and EVServer B and run Archiving and Indexing on it and Mailbox Archiving Task will run to Archive databases on Mailbox server 1.
2. Create another EV Cluster and run Archiving and Indexing that will be enable on EVServer C and EVServer D, and Mailbox Archiving Task will run to Archive databases on Mailbox server 2. For Database request will go to SQL Cluster running on EVServer A and EVServer B.

The reason for taking this approach was to distribute the load of archiving 6500 mailboxes on each cluster and made it high available too.

Please advise whether the approach i am having is correct or any other suggestion in building our new EV environment will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Rob_Wilcox1]

First point ...

Do not have SQL on the same cluster as EV.

Second point ...

I dislike Active / Active clusters (personal opinion)

Just my 2p worth :)

[Tonaco_pt]

Hi Rob, I also have a Cluster with Sql and EV (9.4) install, can you please elaborate on your first point, so I can understand, I'm about to upgrade the EV and would like to take that in consideration.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Having SQL and EV on the same machine(s) is not a good idea from a performance point of view, disaster recovery point of view, and a segregation of responsibility point of view.

[Tonaco_pt]

Thanks Rob, I'm aware of does issue, I thought there might be something that could break the EV/SQL Cluster. 

[ZTag]

Thanks Rob for your advise. Can you guide me in changing the plan i have put into place.

[Rob_Wilcox1 · Accepted solution]

Well, there are a variety of options available, one such option would be:

SQL Cluster

2 (or 4) x EV servers, built using Building Blocks, all with remote storage.  

My personal opinion is that I don't really like Enterprise Vault being clustered.  Standalone is fine provided all the storage configurations involve remote (but nearby) storage.  This way you can use Building Blocks to 'failover' to another machine when needed.  It's not as automated as a cluster - but still.

Your best though is to contact one of the Symantec Partnters that specialises in Enterprise Vault implementations, and get their advice.  If you want some suggestions, please drop me a PM in the forums.