Vault 10, building blocks info

[James_Slack]

Hi,

I have been tasked with installing Vault 10 in 2 sites with the ability to replicate.

I know I need to use Building Blocks to do this, however, the docuentation just says "ask for Symantec consultancy time".

I would firstly like to know if anyone has any info on Building Blocks.

Also, if I wanted to build the primary site first and add the DR site down the line, would I be able to do a normal instll on the 1st site, or would I have to do something with Building Blocks at the very start?

To add to the fun, I will then need to migrate from our V9 server to V10.

Any info would be great.

Thanks

James

[JesusWept3]

Take a look at the following document and see if it helps explain anything a little more:
http://www.cstl.com/Products/Symantec/Symantec-Enterprise_Vault/Achieving%20High%20Availability.pdf

Also a real quick overview of USL itself
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/testing-disaster-recovery-ev-901#comment-5601061

Also you may want to take a look at EVNearSync by Quadrotech
http://www.quadrotech-it.com/products/evnearsync/

[James_Slack]

Thanks JesusWept2.

Had a quick look at the first one and it is all talking about shared storage and clustering which is no good as the sites are 30+ miles apart and on a 100mb line that is shared with loads of other stuff.

Will have a complete read though all this and see what's what, but I was assuming with Building Blocks, we would have a Vault DB in each site and not shared storage.

Thanks

James

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

I suppose what you could do is something like

SiteA
SQLServer1.myDomain.com
myEVServer1.myDomain.com
myEVServer2.myDomain.com

SiteB
SQLServer2.myDomain.com
myEVServer3.myDomain.com
myEVServer4.myDomain.com

Aliases
evSQLServer -> sqlserver1.myDomain.com
evserver1 -> myevserver1.myDomain.com
evserver2 -> myevserver2.myDomain.com

You then do either log shipping or replication of the Monitoring, Auditing, Directory, vault store and fingerprint databases from SQLServer1 -> SQLServer2

You would also need mirrored storage  preferably using mapped drives
So you could have something like

on EVServer1 -
E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\VaultStore1\Ptn1 -> \\myNASDevice1\Enterprise Vault Stores\...

on EVServer3 -
E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\VaultStore1\Ptn1 -> \\myNASDevice2\Enterprise Vault Stores\....

Then when you need to fail over, you change the aliases

evSQLServer -> sqlserver2.myDomain.com
evserver1 -> myevserver3.myDomain.com
evserver2 -> myevserver4.myDomain.com

Then you run the Update Service Locations, EV will connect to the Aliases and see that the ComputerNames have changed and run a few stored procedures and create any necessary services.

And because you have the SQL Server aliased also, it wouldn't need anything changing from the sql server side, and because you have the Storage using drive letters and the storage mirrored, it wouldn't need any reconfiguration on the drives side of things.

USL however is NOT High Availability, theres too much manual work involved, for instance where as clustering will fail over on certain conditions, USL needs someone to know that there is an issue and to manually run the whole procedure

But really thats your only choice or EVNearSync itself, I've had my disagreements  with them in the past as I don't believe replication is a form of backup in the slightest, but for this type of scenario its absolutely perfect and its as simple as just hitting a button

[James_Slack]

Thanks, will have a read and see what's what.