Migration of Enterprise Vault Database to another Server

[Yan_Thung_Seng]

Dear all,

We have a need to conduct a migration project for EV8 database and wish to seek for best practice and advises before proceeding. The existing environment as follow

AD:2003, MS EXCH2003 Ent SP2, File servers: Windows 2003 Std (all 32bit)

EV server: Win 2003 Std SP2 (32bit), Enterprise Vault 8 SP5 running Journaling, email and file archiving. Virtual Vault enabled for 10 users. All running in the same machine.

EV hardware: VM with 4 x vCPU with 3.5GB RAM.

EV storage: NetApp FAS 2050, Index and DB at FC disk and archive files at SATA disk.

EV DB: MS SQL2005 Std installed in same machine.

We are very soon upgrading to EXCH2010 and hence we are upgrading EV to9.1 for compatibility requirement. However currently we are facing performance issue with our EV server. Due to growth of users, mail and file transaction as well as use of Virtual Vault. We are having CPU bottleneck which can reach as much as 100% when schedules run or heavy Journaling. For the reason, we wish to settle the problem issue before proceeding for upgrade.

We wish to migrate the EV database to a separate box so that we can allocate more CPU and RAM dedicated to the DB. Hopefully it will settle the performance issue. Prior to the migration, we wish to know if

1. The new DB server is fine if we configure 4 x vCPU, 8GB RAM in a WIN2003 STD 64Bit + x64 SQL 2005 STD. By doing so it is easier for us to scale in the future. Is it fully compatible with EV8?
2. One of our vendor have highlighted, if migrating to x64 SQL server, Enterprise Reporting is supported, except for: Vault Store usage summary, Vault store Usage by Archive and Vault store usage by account will not be supported. We wish to know if it is true, because if yes we can’t migrate the DB to the x64 SQL server.
3. Since we are upgrading to EV9 very soon, may I know the recommended sequence? E.g. migrate the DB first or in place upgrade to EV9 first?

Your advice is very important to us, thousand thanks in advance.

Regards  

[JesusWept3]

1. Yes it will be compatible
2. Those reports have been fixed in EV9 for x64 report servers
3. Really it's all based on preference. If it were me i'd like to migrate the SQL Server first, making sure that the new server keeps the same collations as the old server (especially for the Master and Temp DB's) that way you won't run in to issues down the line.

I would then let it burn in for a week or two, fix any issues that might come up, and then when you're comfortable with SQL and the performance it gives, then upgrade your enterprise vault servers.

The 100% bottlenecking you are seeing is most likely coming for the converter sandbox converting items, but ina  virtual environment i have seen this a lot when the disk space becomes really low and the VMWare server is spending all its time swapping memory on the disk.

[Yan_Thung_Seng]

Thousand thanks for the prompt response with very useful guide. From you point, is that mean if we do the SQL migration prior to the upgrade, some reports will not work until we upgrade to EV9?  I also forgot to ask if there is a migration guide for the Database migration downloadable anywhere?

thanks

[Mohawk_Marvin · Accepted solution]

To move EV DB's follow this tech note:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH35744

[Yan_Thung_Seng]

thousand thanks for all prompt response.

regards