Exchange server impact when EV archive the journal mailbox continuously ?

[John_Santana]

Hi People,

Can anyone please let me know what's the impact on the email flow on the Exchange Serverm, when I enable the EV archive for Exchange Journal mailbox during the business hours ?

I'm using Exchange Server 2007 SP3 with EV 9.0.4, my goals is to enable the EV Journal archive job to run 24x7 because I'm not sure how long the EV will be in backup mode so I guess to make thing sinpler I just enable the archiving window to be 24x7 all day long.

What's your thought and recommendation ?

For the user mailboxes, I will be doing the EV Archive outside the business hours.

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

The impact shoud be minimal and Archiving the Journal mailbox 24X7 is the most common scenario and is how the EV Journal task is meant to be ran.  Unless something has changed, you can't schedule the journal task, it just runs and processes.  If you don't want to journal during specific times you would need to script the task to stop and start.

Just curious, is the Exchange Journal mailbox on a dedicated Exchange server?  If yes, then you shouldn't have to worry about that at all.

Best,

[John_Santana]

Tony, thanks for the reply:

 is the Exchange Journal mailbox on a dedicated Exchange server?

no it is on the same mailbox server as with the other mailbox as well.

[GertjanA · Accepted solution]

Hello John,

I've seen large implementations, and Journal Archiving runs 24hrs a day. If your Journal Store(s) go in backup, obviously no writing is being done. EV Journal Archiving is in my experience fast enough to catch up when EV comes out of backup mode. Depending on the amount of mails being journaled, it might be wise to place the Journal Mailboxes in a seperate Mailbox Store, and then NOT replicate this store.

Journal Archving by nature means that items come into the Journal Mailbox, and are archive almost immediately. This indicates lots of changes on the mailbox, and if you replicate these, issues may occur with your Exchange logfiles. But, if there is a small amount of messages coming in, you might want to replicate as usual.

What I have done in large environments, is to create multiple Journal Mailboxes, each targeted by a seperate task, and if possible on seperate EV-servers. Using monitoring (powershell script to get the number of items in the Journal Mailbox) you can 'switch' a Journal Mailbox that grows quick in Exchange, to allow EV to empty it, then switch back to the original Journal Mailbox. This all depends on the amount of mails, and the processing of the Journal Mailbox. Experience will tell if you need mutliple Journal Mailboxes or not.

[John_Santana]

"Journal Archving by nature means that items come into the Journal Mailbox, and are archive almost immediately."

yes that is what I wanted to achieve, because my EV backup took more than 4 days to complete which practically only leaves weekend time to archive more than 450.000 emails in the EVJournal mailbox.

you are right Gertjan, the EV Journal mailbox is configured to be replicated by CCR to my DRsite, does that makes the EV archiving even slower ?

[GertjanA · Accepted solution]

Hello John,

Depending on your EV Journal Archiving server specs, 450000 is not a problem...

Having the journal mailbox replicate to your DR environment is imho a useless action. Why? Assuming you have a Journal Mailbox in Prod which is near 0:

Items come in, and get replicated. EV archives items from the mailbox, effectively removing them from the mailbox. This also needs to be replicated. In the end, the Journal Mailbox on DR will be empty, but you have lots of logshipping going on for nothing. Others might disagree, but this is my opinion.

What I would do is the following:

Create a new Journal Archive, and an EV Journal Task and a new Journal Mailbox in Exchange (PROD).

Change journaling in Exchange to the new Journal Mailbox. This way, you have an empty Journal Mailbox to start working on with EV, which probably allows EV to keep up on that mailbox.

Keep the existing archive/task/journal mailbox, and let EV process that mailbox until it is empty.

For both Journal Mailboxes, do not replicate. Configure a (standalone) mailboxstore on the DR server, and create a Journal mailbox (or more) (name it to be sure you know it is the DR Journalmailbox)

I assume you have tasks already configured targeting the Exchange DR Server(s). Configure the (DR)Journaling task to target the DR JournalMailbox. As soon as a DR happens, switch the Journaling Rule in Exchange to use the DR Journal Mailbox, start the tasks responsible for the DR server archiving. When you switch back from DR, keep BOTH tasks running until the DR Journal Mailbox is empty.

You might need to get more advise on this, but the above is (in very brief) what I have done in environments I have been in.

[John_Santana]

Cool, many thanks Gertjan and Tony.