Virtualizing EV with Centera Storage

[AlanJ]

I'm looking for some information around Virtualizing an EV 9 environment.

I have a client who is looking to go the virtual route with their servers and was wondering if there are any potential issues that may arise from this?

All data is archived on a Centera.

The potential curveball is that I think they are considering Hyper-V. Has the best practise been released for that yet?

Thanks in advance.

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

You should be ok, just give this and the referenced docs a read through.

Running Enterprise Vault on a virtual server

Article:HOWTO79542

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Created: 2012-09-21

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Updated: 2013-01-18

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Article URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO79542

According to the Compatibility doc:

Enterprise Vault supports the use of all virtualization technologies that run supported versions of the Windows operating system.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Haven't seen a best practice for Hyper-V, but if you know your stuff then translating the information in the VMWare Best Practice:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH180094

.. Shouldn't be 'impossible'.

[AlanJ]

Great, thanks. I will have a look at those docs.

[GertjanA]

FYI, I have been in an environment running 15 personal archiving servers, and 6 journal archiving servers all virtual, having storage to a HP San.

No issues what so-ever, it actually became faster, due to better underlying hardware. It was VMWare ESX, but for Hyper-V should be the same.

[ia01]

We have one customer setup with 4 x EV Server for mailbox archiving and 12 x EV Server for FSA Archiving all going to two replicated Centera. All EV Server are runnign in Hyper-V 2012 server and we followed the VMWare ESX best practices and all seems to be running pretty happily. During last 4 months we have archived total 40TB of data into Centera. Just make sure that you have a replicated Centera in 2nd DR site. Otherwise there is no Backup of Vault Stores.

Other important lesson we learned, when setting up Centera make sure to setup Centera as Parity instead of Mirroring, otherwise you might be wasting a lot of space.

Finally would suggest Server 2012 if you want to go ahead with Hyper-V instead of VSphere.

Hope this helps.

[AlanJ]

Thanks for all the info. We have been experiencing issues with the Centera of late as it ran out of free space and so needs to be re-initialised once the DR Centera is actually based offsite but I think the idea will be to have it as Parity once re-initialised.

 I have a feeling that the client will go for Server 2012.

I'm not sure what the spec of the hardware will be but hopefully it will be enough to handle the environment.