Vault Cache and Virtual Virtual

[EVRocks]

I have seen a Symantec flashdemo on Virtual Vault by Alex Brown and it seems it's a good feature to enable on EV to give end-user a good experience.

I would like to know if anyone out there used this feature and how popular or practical is from user's archive administration point of view. What are pros and cons.

Currently we implement archiving using the normal way by using tasks and policies and at night archiving run starts and then backup take place.

If you implement Vault Cache will EV leave any archive data on the user's local machine.

[WiTSend]

We use Virtual Vault for almost all our our users.  We experience occassional syncing problems, being global in nature, but overall the experience it positive and well liked by the users.  The Virtual Vault is a representation of the vault cache which is a local copy of the archive, so yes, you will have archived data on the user's machines. 

It is possible to configure VV without the local storage,but that has not proven to be successful for us.

[Patti_Rodgers · Accepted solution]

From my experience in the field, it is a very popular feature. The end users *love* it.  There are some challenges but my experience has been that customers who identify the challenges in advance and plan around them have very smooth and successful rollouts.

Some things you may wish to consider:

-As you mention leaving archive data on the end user machine, the cache itself is a local copy of the online archive. Some companies have security policies that prevent this kind of data being stored to the local machine so you would want to ensure this does not violate any such policies in your company.  

-The cache is required in order for Virtual Vault to be visible; you can choose to sync only the archived item metadata in order to reduce the space and bandwidth requirements but many users don't like this, as the client still needs to go to the EV server to fetch anything they wish to view, and the optional integration with Windows Desktop Search would be limited to just the metadata (users couldn't find the content in their WDS searches if you only sync the metadata).

-The initial sync can take a bit of time, and "how much time" depends on various factors such as your network bandwidth, average archive size, and server/client horsepower. Some customers choose to sync only the most recent year or two of data to combat the potential issues faced when a user has a massive archive, or to restrict the amount of space the cache is allowed to consume on the workstation. Review the policies carefully and see which restrictions, if any, would best suit your environment

-When a user performs manual archiving via Virtual Vault drag-and-drop, the only copy of the data is removed from exchange straight away but is not written to the EV server until the user performs a sync. So there is a narrow window of time where a workstation permanent failure or a cache reset can cause the data to be lost.  Because of this, some customers choose to NOT allow drag-and-drop archiving via Virtual Vault, and allow users to rely on the nightly archiving tasks doing that job

-In more recent versions, you can configure your Desktop policy to trigger a sync after the user has manually archived X number of items or X mb in size; this is a great help but be cautious to not set the value too low; forcing a sync after every 1 item dragged to the Virtual Vault could bring some unwanted side effects such as frequent occurence of Server Busy messages as the finite number of sync slots are constantly all consumed.

-If you choose to allow drag-and-drop archiving, it tends to be very popular when the users first see it. It's not at all uncommon to see users dragging entire PST's into the archive. This can cause performance issues on the server, in the same way that a user doing a Store In Vault on 10's of thousands of mails would.  So you should roll out gradually and monitor the server performance as you continue to roll out to more users

These are not con's --- they are just things you have to consider as you introduce any new technology and potentially change the way the users interface with large amounts of data.  Keep in mind that the VC/VV rollout is essentially calling a massive amount of data which has been at rest for a long time, and pushing it through network pipes that may not be scaled for that amount of traffic, so a gradual rollout is a must.

The pro's are that users Love Love Love the interface, and providing offline access for folks who travel is a huge feature.  The interface itself is familiar to the users, so little training is required (although you may want to spin up an intranet FAQ page for your users that explains your policies and rules as well as how to use the tool).

Excellent whitepaper here http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH75381

There are also some challenges when it comes to providing the VV to Citrix-based users. I am not 100% sure but that may still officially be an unsupported configuration, but regardless, if you have a large number of virtual desktop based users, then a separate discussion on that matter is probably in order.

[JesusWept3]

agreed with all of the above, the issues that you see the most is you can have dataloss
i.e. you move data from a PST to the Vault Cache, the vault cache then corrupts, you can't get the items back. If its moved from Exchange, as long as the Deleted Items feature is enabled in exchange you can retrieve it for a short while.

My advice honestly would for it to not allow storing items, the vault cache corruption is far less frequent at that point and doesnt incur dataloss

[EVRocks]

Thank you guys for your valuable input.

We are completely PST free and this feature is disabled in Outlook so we will be moving data directly from Exchange

As Patti mentioned I think I will be moving to a slightly a separate discussion here:

We are completely VDI based and from VMware/View point of you they do not advise having large file size reside on the local machines.

We have disabled WDS on our desktops.

Currently our users have hundreds of archived shortcuts in their Outlook. What will happen to these shortcuts when the user switched to VV.

Will the cached size be the image of the entire users archived data so when the sync process bring the entire archived data to the local machine.

[Patti_Rodgers]

The VDI environment is not yet supported for Vault Cache/Virtual Vault.  I'll have a look at release notes and see if that support was introduced and just flew under my radar but one of the challenges (if supported) is in presenting the consistent physical drive resource to the end user so that the cache does not need to rebuild for every session.  If you can solve this challenge, then it will likely be just fine even if it's not an officially supported configuration.  I know Microsoft did not support PST being across the network from the Outlook client for a long time, and I hear they are changing their stance on that, but because VC is built on the same PST technology, we will have the same limitation.  It may or may not work, but we will have few options for troubleshooting and tech support.  Also note that PST pulled across the network tends to be more likely to suffer corruption, even without EV in the mix, hence your VC pulled across the network would be equally vulnerable.

I would keep an eye on the release notes as future versions/service packs are released as I know that this is a common request and while I believe product management is considering enhancing this area, I don't know if there is a firm commitment there yet or what the timeframe would be. I will, however, go back and look at some of the recent releases as there are so many fixes and enhancements in any given one, that it's very possible for things to go beneath my radar.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Everything was going well, until you mentioned VDI :(

[EVRocks]

I suppose we are kind of stuffed here. Speaking to the VDI team it's unlikely that we will present an additional disk for this purpose. I guess we have to wait for EV 11.0...