Enterprise Vault and disk defragmentation ?

[John_Santana]

Hi,

Does anyone here can give a comment and insight of whether the Enterprise Vault is better off to be defragged or left running as it is ?

I got one of the sales people chasing me up and suggesting me that Enterprise Vault server even as Virtual Machine with Physical RDM LUN need to be defragged regularly every week or so.

[AmolB]

If you have any perfromance issues or if your EV backups are taking long time to complete than you 

should think about defragmenting EV (storage location). Refer to below links.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/defrag-enterprise-vault-server

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH141917

[John_Santana]

Amol,

Does this means that any disk defragmentation should do it ?

we have 9 Vaults and plenty of indexes drives, the total disk consumption is more than 8 TB

[Rob_Wilcox1 · Accepted solution]

Things like your EV data partitions are written to 'only once'.  So you shouldn't see much fragmentation on that side of things.  Index locations maybe more so, over time.

I wouldn't normally suggest defragmentation, servers and disks are generally super-fast enough these days. However, if you insist, or what to check, I'd install one that will allow you to REPORT on fragmentation, and then you can monitor it over time, and decide yourself whether to run it in 'real' mode or not.

PS Certainly NOT every week.. that would be crazy.

[Chau_Tran]

Like Rob said, EV partitions are written to 'only once' and nowadays disks are generally very-fast so there isn't a real need to perform defrag. If you are using Collection then it may be worth doing defrag but from my experience it causes more issues than what it's worth. Once the defrag it's done, which may take days, and then users do restore/and retrieve the defrag becomes pointless. Also if defrag goes wrong, which I have come across a few times, causes more issues than you started off with.

For better performance you need to look at better and faster disks/LUNs rather than defrag options.

Hope that helps.

[Dead-Data]

Hi John,

You haven't said what the underlying storage for the indexes and parititions are.

Local / Network ? Shared / Dedicated ? Thin provisioned ?  Deduplication enabled ?

Also which version of Enterprise Vault are you running EV10 or EV9 and earlier ?

Generally wouldn't recommend using Windows disk defrag on NAS or SAN destinations.

Your storage manufacturer will have specific advice regarding maintaining performance and throughput.

Hope this helps

David

[John_Santana]

Jack,

Many thanks for your reply, here are the answer to your questions:

it is locally attached Physical RDM bypassing the VMware layer, so its underlying disk are all SATA 7200 rpm (on EMC CX4-240)

THe EV version is just 8.0 SP4