Upgrade from EV8.0 to 9.0.1

[CourShor]

I currently look after our EV environment running on Exch2003 with 3 backends, my team are looking at upgrading our exchange environment to Exch2010, we currently have about 7,000 active mailboxes that have been archived onto the 1 Enterprise Vault Server (8.0sp4) running via SQL2000.  To upgrade to Exch2010 we will be upgrading ev to 9.0.1, however due to performance issues we would like to have more than one EV server when we upgrade, also for a short period of time we will be running two environments (exchange 2003 and exchange 2010).Does anyone have any pointers as to how we may configure the Enterprise Vault environment for the upgrade? (ie: upgrading from one server 8.0sp4 to more than one on 9.0.1)

[JesusWept3]

Well if they're all part of the same site, all servers need to go up to EV9 SP1, you can't have servers with different versions installed

[CourShor]

Thank you, I am looking for some pointers so that we can upgrade to EV9 SP1, however instead of having just the one server as we have on EV8 SP4 we want to have more than one EV9 SP1 to handle the amount of users we have since we will also be enabling public folder archiving.

[JesusWept3]

oh sorry, yeah, gotcha, well my first suggestion is upgrade the first server to EV9 SP1 since that is an absolute must, secondly i would make sure that you are all squared away with your licensing and everything (making sure that you are ok for PF archiving and such)

Then depending on how you're spreading the users, perhaps have the first server handling the exchange 2003 tasks, then on the second server create another vault store for your exchange 2010 servers and create the tasks there, and then a third server with a seperate vault store for Public folder archiving

Join all the vault stores to the same Vault Store group and make sure that sharing is enabled between the three.

You may not need a third server just for PF archiving though, 7,000 users should be fine between the two ev servers, however you may want to use a third in case something happens to one of the other two and you can just USL across to the thrid one

[JesusWept3]

oh and make sure you put on Windows  Server 2008 x64 R2 if you can , because when EV10 comes out, thats the minimum (and currently only) supported OS for EV10, so future proof yourself!

[CourShor]

thank you very much

[WiTSend]

1st - you'll need to upgrade your SQL server, preferably to 2008 2nd - you should upgrade the existing EV server to EV9 (and the OS as mentioned above). You can archive both Ex2003 and Ex2010 from the same EV server. 3rd - if the desire is to split the archives between a couple EV9 servers, the best way would be to deploy the second EV9 archive server and then use the move archive tool to migrate some of the users to the new EV server. This will only work if you have more than one Exchange server. EV cannot have two email archive tasks pointed at the same Exchange server.