Multiple Expiry Servers?

[MarkOlsen]

All:

Ours is a simple setup: single Exchange Server, single EV 2007 SP2 servere, single SQL 2005 Server with 83 million items.  We are about to enable expiry (pending approval from Legal) and according to the benchmark studies, expiry will process about 100,000 items per hour.  If we run it 3 hours per day, that means it will take 8 months to process our entire 5+ Terabyte size system. 

Is there any way to design it differently?  For example, can you have multiple servers that only run storage expiry against the single EV and 2005 servers?   Or, will SQL become the limiting factor?

Thoughts?

Thanks ... Mark

[MichelZ]

Mark

How many items of those 83 Millions will be eligible for expiry?

I don't believe it's more than 20%... which leaves us ~17 Mio Items.

100'000 Items per hour = 17'000'000 / 100'000 = 170 hours

And couldn't you just allow storage expiry during the day, for let's say 8-12 hours?

I don't think this will have such a huge impact on the EV Server.

How many users are on the Server?

Is SQL Server separate?

What's the CPU/RAM Spec for EV/SQL Server?

Cheers

Michel

[MarkOlsen]

Hi Michel:

Actually, based on some of our calculations, we will be expiring something like 75% of the items (unless on legal hold).   Both the EV and SQL Servers are dual processor, dual core Xeons with 4 GB of RAM each.  They are separate servers.  We also have about 1,800 active users on the EV server with a total of 3,300 mailboxes archived (difference is due to archival of system and service accounts as well as former employees).

Mark

[Simon_Butler]

Couple of things;

Do you have shortcuts and have they already been expired?

Can you not expire for 24hrs Sat/Sun

Have you run an expiry report to get actual numbers?  (Though you'd need Symantec to advise on the impact of actually doing this - run at the weekend I guess if ok)

Unfortunately I think you're going to have to check the Storage Expiry event once the first run window has completed and extrapolate from there.

[MarkOlsen]

Hi Simon:

I actually wrote a Crystal Report to calculate the numbers that will be expired (absent a legal hold), so we know the numbers.   I also spoke with one of the Product Managers and he indicated that this is very SQL Server intensive and even with multiple expiry services, this would actually be the weakest length.  Tony also shared that while the performance guidelines indicate 100,000/hour, some customers are seeing better rates.   As far as running 24 x 7 on the weekends, that of course would prevent our full backups from running.   We are going to test various scenarios and I'll let everyone know for their reference what our learnings are.

Regards ... Mark

[Simon_Butler]

Backups take 48 hours?

[Faxson]

We did a large expiry recently before we go to production (no journaling load on the servers).  With 6 EV servers going simultaneously, we got between 100,000 and 130,000 messages/hour expired. 

We have 6 EV virtual servers on 6 different nodes and 6 SQL servers on one node.  All went OK.

Not sure if SQL is the limiting factor.  Storage expiry is single threaded.

Ben

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