Enterprise Vault "Exchange Mailbox Analyzer"

[EV_Novice]

Dear Experts,

I've been running the EV Exchange Mailbox Analyzer on our single EV 7.5 SP3 server, running under MS WIndows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, Service Pack 2., to try and gain some stats, so that we can size our replacement EV environment correctly. We will, like as not, upgrade though version 8 to version 9 and if appropriate / available, to version 10.We have two Exchange 2007 servers in CCR configuration.

The EMA has been challenging: it runs very slowly. the popular wisdom was that the EMA would take 'a couple of hours' to examine about 500 mailboxes. I've had several attempts and the latest is still running having analyzed 409 out of the sample 516, leaving only 107 to do. The task has taken 7 full days to get this far and I'm pleased that it doesn't appear to have caused any performance woes.

However, about an hour ago, the EMA did something very annoying and frustrating: The panel that shows which servers it  was running against, how many mailboxes it has processed and so on has 'greyed out' leaving me no clues at all, regarding whether its still running or how many mailboxes remain to be processed.

One of the SQL DBA's looked at the created database and confirmed that 409 mailboxes appear to have been dealt with abnd that the analyzer appears to still be running, I cannot afford to lose another week because of this EMA tool having such tendencies. Does anyone have any wise words ? Is there any way to 'refresh' the EMA application panel, so that it will enlighten me regarding current progress ?

The only straws I have to clutch are that Task Manager suggests the EMA is still running and the SQL DBA advises that three more mailboxe have been processed.

Appreciate your guidance !

thanks

[TonySterling]

I have seen this with other applications where they grey out but keep running.

As long as you see in SQL the maillboxes being processed I would leave it alone.

Regards,

[Rob_Wilcox1]

From your screenshot there is 100% CPU usage.  If you look at the processes, which process(es) are consuming the CPU?  It could be that EMA has gone in to some sort of infinite loop.

It certainly shouldn't (in my opinion) take more than a few hours (at most) to analyze 500 Mailboxes.  Are these all on one Exchange server?  Is this all on a closely connected network environment?

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

How long it takes is going to vary.  I recently ran EMA for a 1200 user environment analyzing 15% of the mailboxes with the Enable Full analysis box checked and it took over 9 hours.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

AH okay, fair enough.  Then I guess it begs the question of what analysis mode was performed.

[Bdawg20000]

I have inherited an almost complete EV environment and would like to run this tool on our environment since it has been 2 years since the initial install and now a new version of the product.  We are going to begin ingesting data in a few weeks but I would like to have some information on what we will actually be ingesting.  If anyone could point me in the direction of getting this tool I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

Brian Hubbard

[AndrewB]

EV_Novice, i just learned something and wanted to share it with you.

Run SQL Profiler and see which queries are issued against AnalyzerCommon database, for example, a frequent query is something like:
select * from AttachmentHash where Hash='zzzzzz' and EXCHMBXID=1 order by ID

If AttachmentHash is a large table, then these queries are very resource intensive without an index. To create them run this command in SQL Management Studio:

createindex ix1 on AttachmentHash(Hash, EXCHMBXID)

The more unique column is better to list first in index.