Mailboxes moving into another Forest

[EVGarrison]

Hi There,
My company is going through a bit of merging process and I’ve been asked if something is possible and I’m not sure if EV will even allow us.

We have 4 Different domains that have no relation to each other at all, we are going to be creating a new forest and the plan is to move the mailboxes only from the exchange servers from each of the domains into a parent domain and Exchange server. I’m not concerned with the other 3 comps as they don’t use EV, the actual domain accounts will continue to reside in our current Domain but the mailbox will reside on the new exchange environment, (ex2010).
My concern is what way to approach this from an EV perspective, can we leave the current EV server in our current domain and just add the new Exchange server from the different domain into EV then migrate the mailboxes over. Or do we setup a new EV server, disable all our mailboxes migrate them over then Enable then at the other end on the new EV box.

To be honest id rather keep our current box but I’ve no idea how EV will run between the 2 domains.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated

[JesusWept3]

Enterprise Vault will easily run against all four domains that you want to add (for instance with the company that i work for we have some EV sites targeting 6 or 7 domains).

Your biggest concern is probably going to be duplicate mailboxes, because Enterprise Vault determines things such as LegacyMbxDN as to whether this is a new mailbox or an existing mailbox, and most likely when you go to Exchange 2010 you will end up with EV seeing this as a new mailb ox and create a new archive.

I would strongly suggest trying to configure a multi domain environment within VMWare and test the different scenarios yourself as you don't want it to get to the crunch time and not being quite too certain with how this will all work out in the end.

Also would suggest engaging Symantec or one of the partners to see if they can help you design a migration strategy should it be needed.
But really you should be ok with the target EV server in your own domain, you just may need to expand the amount of servers due to the extra load you will be bringing on