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Scaling EV

Giacomo
Level 3

Is there a point when it is recommended to split off the Mailbox Archive and Journal Archive into separate EV directories (Approx 24K users)?  My Client is looking to use DA and CA against the Journal.  Is there a published doc that references best practices for such decisions?

 

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TonySterling
Moderator
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No, there isn't going to be a doc designed for public consumption.  It really depends on the volume of mail to be archived\journaled.

Did you have your EV system designed by a certified Symantec partner? I am a bit surprised you don't have a dedicated journal server already but again, it comes down to the amount of mail.

Do you have two vault stores, one for mailbox and one for journal?

 

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AndrewB
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yes that's correct and i'm sure tony was going down the same path before i interjected. in certain cases with extremely large or geographically diverse environments there could be circumstances which would dictate seperate EV directories but i dont think you're there. 25k is large but by no means the largest in terms of EV's scale.

assuming all your indexes are 64bit already... if you run into performance issues with DA you could explore the option of seperating DA's SQL databases onto a dedicated server, increasing the indexing resources on your journal servers, etc. you might even look into Clearwell as an option depending on your client's eDiscovery requirements.

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Patti_Rodgers
Level 4
Employee Accredited Certified

I would strongly recommend that you archive all journal mailbox data into one retention category and all user mailbox data into another retention category.  This is a pretty simple change to make by just reconfiguring the properties of the Journal target, provisioning groups, etc.  You will still be able to single-instance between vault stores to whatever degree you are currently doing that.  It's not an uncommon request for the business to want to change their retention strategy, and handle different data differently; for example, you may retain everything "forever" currently, but the company rules change and you want to expire journals after 7 years and user data after 3 years. If everything is in one big bucket (retention category) this is a nightmare but if each of these two distinct data sets is in its own category, it's about 4 minutes of work to make the change.

You can have two retention categories that are confgured to retain data for the identical amount of time.  This just allows you easy flexibility down the road. If you never use it, you're only out a few minutes of admin time that it took to set up.

As for how big a site can be before it needs to be split, that is kind of a "how long is a peice of string" question but from a purely mechanical standpoint, I know of one customer with about 55 EV servers and 140k users, mix of mailbox and journaling, all in a single site. The only challenge their architecture has created is for their once-or-twice-a-year upgrades which become an "all hands on deck" kind of thing; all EV servers in the site must be upgraded in the same window (can't upgrade 4 today and 5 tomorrow unless you don't mind none of them working till they are all done) so they need a lot of hands to get them all done. They prefer this because it makes their daily admin work a lot more streamlined since it is all in one site.

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8 REPLIES 8

TonySterling
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

No, there isn't going to be a doc designed for public consumption.  It really depends on the volume of mail to be archived\journaled.

Did you have your EV system designed by a certified Symantec partner? I am a bit surprised you don't have a dedicated journal server already but again, it comes down to the amount of mail.

Do you have two vault stores, one for mailbox and one for journal?

 

AndrewB
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

just to make sure we have the terminology straight, are you asking about having or expanding your EV site from 1 server to multiple EV servers or are you asking about creating an entirely seperate EV directory (or in other words, environment,) to separate journaling from mailbox archiving? FWIW, the latter would not be recommended.

Giacomo
Level 3

Hello Tony,

Thanks for your reply.  The original design and initial build was handled by a certified Symantec partner close to a year ago, but was never implemented past the Pilot phase.  Now the partner is no longer available and we are looking to move forward with implementation.  

To be clear we do have multiple dedicated Mailbox Archive Servers and also multiple dedicated Journal Archive Servers, and I am in the process of separating the Vault Stores into separate VSGs.  Upon review I notice that all fall into a single EV Directory.  Is there a point when it becomes more prudent to separate the client facing environment completely from the compliance environment?  I'm concerned that to accomplish this at a later stage when the environment is populated would be much more difficult.

Regards,

Giacomo

Giacomo
Level 3

AndrewB,

Thanks for your reply.  I appreciate your recommendation to not create a completely separate EV Directory. In effect, I understand from your comment that it is a better practice to keep the compliance environment (Journaling) and the client-facing environment (Mailbox Archiving) in the same EV directory.  Simply splitting up the roles by server.

Am I to read that this continues to be best practice even for very large organizations (25K+ user environments)?

Regards,

Giacomo

AndrewB
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

yes that's correct and i'm sure tony was going down the same path before i interjected. in certain cases with extremely large or geographically diverse environments there could be circumstances which would dictate seperate EV directories but i dont think you're there. 25k is large but by no means the largest in terms of EV's scale.

assuming all your indexes are 64bit already... if you run into performance issues with DA you could explore the option of seperating DA's SQL databases onto a dedicated server, increasing the indexing resources on your journal servers, etc. you might even look into Clearwell as an option depending on your client's eDiscovery requirements.

Patti_Rodgers
Level 4
Employee Accredited Certified

I would strongly recommend that you archive all journal mailbox data into one retention category and all user mailbox data into another retention category.  This is a pretty simple change to make by just reconfiguring the properties of the Journal target, provisioning groups, etc.  You will still be able to single-instance between vault stores to whatever degree you are currently doing that.  It's not an uncommon request for the business to want to change their retention strategy, and handle different data differently; for example, you may retain everything "forever" currently, but the company rules change and you want to expire journals after 7 years and user data after 3 years. If everything is in one big bucket (retention category) this is a nightmare but if each of these two distinct data sets is in its own category, it's about 4 minutes of work to make the change.

You can have two retention categories that are confgured to retain data for the identical amount of time.  This just allows you easy flexibility down the road. If you never use it, you're only out a few minutes of admin time that it took to set up.

As for how big a site can be before it needs to be split, that is kind of a "how long is a peice of string" question but from a purely mechanical standpoint, I know of one customer with about 55 EV servers and 140k users, mix of mailbox and journaling, all in a single site. The only challenge their architecture has created is for their once-or-twice-a-year upgrades which become an "all hands on deck" kind of thing; all EV servers in the site must be upgraded in the same window (can't upgrade 4 today and 5 tomorrow unless you don't mind none of them working till they are all done) so they need a lot of hands to get them all done. They prefer this because it makes their daily admin work a lot more streamlined since it is all in one site.

Giacomo
Level 3

Hello Patti,

Thanks for your response.  Your comment to apply different retention categories to the different types of data is sound.  I plan to apply the practice that you recommend.  I had some concerns about the single directory having more than 20K users.  Your example of a Client with 140K users proves that I am not pushing any boundary of scalability.  As long as we're OK with patching the entire environment at a single time then we are good to go.

Regards,

Giacomo

Giacomo
Level 3

Andy,

Thanks again for your response.  This has been very helpful.

Giacomo