How to convert standalone EV server to multiple EV servers?

[jan_villeres]

We have a standalone EV 10.0.4 server running with Exchange Mailbox Archiving and File System Archiving.

The increased load is putting a lot of stress on the server so we are planning to create two EV servers.

Each will only run 1 funtionality which is either Exchange Mailbox or File System Archiving.

Any ideas on how this can be achieved smoothly?

Making sure that archived mail and file items are still retrievable.

Thank you in advance.

[AndrewB]

there are a few factors which influence how much flexibility you have such as:

1. how many archives of each type?

2. how much data of each type?

3. what type of storage are you using?

you can install a new EV server and create your FSA or Mailbox archiving task(s) on the new server. you'll have to decide which one you want to move but the thing is, you'll have cross server archiving for any archives which stay on the old server. there's "move archive" for mailbox archives but not for FSA so for example, you could built your new EV server as a mailbox archiving server, remove the mailbox archiving tasks from the old EV server, create them on the new EV server, and use "move archive" to gradually migrate the mailbox archives over to your new server. you'll need to take a small outage while you do the new EV server build and config but mail and file will remain retrievable as long as the tasks exist somewhere.

[jan_villeres]

Thank you AndrewB.

1. how many archives of each type?

- EMA has around 1000 mailboxes

- FSA has around 20 archive points

2. how much data of each type?

- EMA is around 3.5 TB

- FSA is around 2.0 TB

3. what type of storage are you using?

- EV is a VMware virtual machine so storage is vmdk and datastore is presented as FC LUN

If my understanding is correct:

a. We can create a new EV server under the same EV site. On the new EV server, (for EMA) create a new EV provisioning and mailbox archiving task then perform the move archive operation from old to this new EV server in the background. 

b. If there is no move archive operation for FSA, so we can just migrate the vault store partitions to the new server?

Thank you for your valuable inputs.

[AndrewB]

your understanding of A and B is correct but just to add, if you move the FSA vault store partitions you'd also want to bring over the indexes. my guess is that your indexes for mailbox and FSA arent seperate so that could prove difficult.