Exchange online maintenance and Enterprise Vault

[RonnieArrowECSU]

Hi everyone,

I would like to know what others do when it comes to archiving mail from Exchange using Enterprise Vault and also fit in Exchange online maintenance and backups.

We allow our users to manually archive mail from their mailbox to Enterprise Vault but we also want to backup Enterprise Vault before we delete the mail from the mailbox and leave a shortcut. We also have a daily archiving schedule for a few hours.

In which order do you run the following tasks?

• Exchange 2003 online maintenance
• Exchange 2003 backup
• Enterprise Vault mail archiving task
• Enterprise Vault backup

 I know that any of these jobs should not overlab, but i would like some advise on when to best run these jobs?

I know that after backing up enterprise vault, the storage server on Enterprise Vault will go back and delete the mails that have been archived from exchange.. Is this last task ressource intensive?

All help is much appreciated.

Ronnie

[JesusWept3]

It doesn't really delete the shortcuts, It just edits the existing items, so for instance If you have a pending shortcut and you just delete the pending item, when EV attempts to process the item and it no longer exists it will just carry on to the next item as opposed to creating a shortcut out of thin air That is unless you have your policies set to delete original item and not to create a shortcut As for process intensive, it all really depends on how many items you're archiving throughout the night, normally it you are a new installation and you set out an aggressive schedule and policy to archive as much as possible and as quick as possible then you will see some load on the servers and the exchange transaction logs will be far larger than normal But really the archiving activity at night is when exchange is expected to be quiet and is not competing for the same resources as your users who will typically do more activity than EV does, usually when there's disconnects its when EV is archiving throughout the day at the same time as the bull of users sending and receiving As for the maintananxe schedules, I guess that's all based on preference and I don't think there is a truly right or wrong way to do it, but the way you have it set up and structured is. Dry similar to the way we have it set up at my place also

[RonnieArrowECSU]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I have not really got a schedule of jobs set up really.

Backups of exchange normally run from about 19:00 - 20:45

Then we thought 21:00 - 01:00 for online maintenance

Then from 01:15 - 05:00 we thought to run the email archive

05:15 - 06:00 incremental backup of enterprise vault.

we then hope that from 06:00 to 09:00 that enterpruse vault has converted the pending items to shortcuts

any comments?

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

It all depends on a couple of things 1. What devices are you storing your vault store partitions? (SAN/NAS/NetApp) etc? 2. How much data are you currently backing up with Enterprise Vault? 3. What backup methods are you using? Regular tape backup? Flash backup? Snapshots etc? 4. What software are you using to perform the backups? 45 minutes is a rather short amount of time based on a fairly long archiving window and another thig to consider is that some backup software will not remove the archive bit from the DVS files on a differential or incremental backup Meaning that you would have pending items for up to a week until the full backups are performed You. Oils however use the Partition Secured Notification XML files that net backup or backup exec might generate or the trigger files as well

[Chris_Warren]

Depending on how much is being archived during the window, it can cause alot of transaction logs for Exchange, so you may want to see how large these get on a nightly archive to determine if you would rather run Exchange maintenence after the archiving.