Enterprise Vault on a Virtual Server...

[rsnooks87]

One of our clients has Enterprise Vault 8.0.3 installed on a Virtual Server. Performance is terrible and it apparantly took 6 months to archive 21 (albeit large) mailboxes when it was first installed.

I'm fairly sure that i previously read that it is NOT recommended to install Enterprise Vault on a Virtual Server due to known performance issues that occur and therefore it is recommended for it to be installed on its own physical server.

Can anyone confirm whether or not this is correct and, preferbly, provide a source?

I have been unable to find anything with my limited google skills.

Thanks.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Are you talking about Microsoft Virtual Server, or generically about the server being virtual?

We publish details for VMWare : http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH64450

[rsnooks87]

Well, in this instance it would be Microsoft Hyper-V... but generically would be good.

[WiTSend · Accepted solution]

The key to using virtualized servers is to ensure that there are sufficient resources (CPU and RAM) that are designated for the EV server.  If the resources are not dedicated to the EV server then we see performance issues because the resources cannot be allocated quickly enough to respond to the EV resource requests. 

Another potential problem would be conflict on the NICs. 

Virtualized servers are supported and many environments use them quite successfully, but it does require specific tuning for EV.  EV is a resource intensive software, especially during archiving runs.

[Mohawk_Marvin]

To answer the OP, EV is fine on a virtual server. Same rules apply that would do to any virtual server; ensure it has adequate resources and is not competing constantly with other machines on the host

[AndrewB]

ditto. it runs just fine if your virtual infrastructure is up to it. i've seen everything from companies running EV on enterprise VMware farms to a simple standalone 2-node Hyperv setup with direct attached storage.

[ZeRoC00L]

How many resources (CPU, Memory, Disk, network) did you allocate for Enterprise Vault and do not forget the SQL server, it also requires a lot of resources.

When archiving, you should monitoring the resources, and see which one is the bottleneck.

Also check your archiving schedule, if there is only 1 hour archiving time per day, yes it will take a while. Sometimes archiving start at almost the same time as the backup and EV in backup mode does not archive.

[GertjanA]

In the environment I worked in a while ago, EV ran in Hyper-V environment just fine. 4 Mailbox archiving servers, each handling about 5000 mailboxes just fine!

It is as stated above, important to make sure you have enough underlying CPU and RAM so the VM's run at best performance.