Upgrade of Enterprise Vault from 7.5 SP4 to 8.0 SP4 and later on to 9.0

[WLRK_VBN]

I'm planning to do an upgrade of EV from 7.5 SP4 to 8.0 SP4 and later on to 9.0. Is there a big change on a client side in terms of introducing any new features within Outlook client?

How painfull is an upgrade from 7.5 SP4 / SP6   to 8.0 SP4?

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

From the client side, the biggest change is that Offline Vault is now replaced with Vault Cache (and Virtual Vault from EV8 SP3 onwards) Any Offline vault users would just continue to run in Read Only mode but can't be controlled via policy anymore For your upgrade, you would just need to go straight from EV 2007 SP4 to EV8 SP4, you wouldn't need to upgrade the service packs (that isn't the case for DA though from what I understand) Really the upgrade is quite simple and no more difficult than previous upgrades, just remember to back up thoroughly and read up on Vault Store Groups and the changes to the Storage as that will affect backups and may introduce some questions regarding how you have your vault stores set up Also you may want to read up on how policies are now split up in to Desktop Policy and Mailbox Archiving policy etc

[WiTSend]

After your upgrade to v8sp4 there are some configuration changes and policies (mailbox and desktop) that you need to review.  Changes in the storage methodology will create a "fingerprint" database amonng other things.  Upgrading to v9 will be very simple.

From the user perspective you will now have the ability to use Virtual Vaults, which represents the vault cache the same as a PST to the user's view.  This only affects users that have the vault cache.

[dcpatti]

If you have CA/DA in your environment, these upgrades require a lot of time and a lot of SQL disk space. You may see growth of 500%. Fortunately it is temporary; however, you must make sure you have plenty of disk space on SQL before starting.  This is most painful in the step between EV2007 and EV8.

[MichelZ]

Remember to wait a few hours after upgrading to 8.0 SP4, as there will be a backlog of shortcut tracking stuff going on after the first start of EV8. (Moved shortcuts in the mailbox get reflected to the archive), this can take a while.

Cheers

Michel

[Constanze]

We made very good experience with simply sticking to the upgrade information in the Symantec guides, AdminGuide, information concerning Vault Cache and so on.

The client to us seems to be much more stable (almost no more deactivating valkyrie.dll in Outlook).

Vault Cache really works and performs well (OV was not reliable in our environment before).
We let our users (about 600) reset their Offline Vaults themselves to get the Vault Cache running with a little handout "HOWTO" and it worked well - do not tell too many users at a time to do so as the number of parallel Vault Cache creation is limited in the settings - if queued it will work chronologically.
If it does not work (happened once at ours) check whether the regkeys of Vault Cache point to the correct UserID or maybe an older one (if s.o. had OV before and the UserID has changed but Mailbox/Vault is still the same, like when someone got married e. g.).