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quota based archiving in detail

FLX
Level 4

Hi,

I'm unaware of some quota based archiving details. Does EV continously or only one time check the current mailbox size? Somehow, I didn't find any clear staement in the docs.

So if my Archive Task is scheduled for 6 hours, I'm assuming it only checks quota one time in a sequential procedure. According to my reports it seems true. If you administrate exchange you may know, that an mailbox size is always volatile.

To avoid an increasing mailbox for heavy users within the working hours, it would be better to run archive tasks several times instead on an long term schedule I think.

Exchange backup is snapshot based, so it would pretend pending items issues if backup is not completed prior to the first and longest arching run in the morning (Mailbox Archiving After Exchange and EV Backups fom https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Articles/Finding-the-Time-to-Archive-Mailboxes/ta-p/807162 ) EV Backups and syncs times would be spared, too.

Thanks for a short advice.

 

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GertjanA
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Found:

General info on quota based archiving

This one backs my statement of the single run.

single run KB

This is archiving the mailbox to a percentage of the limit set by the Exchange administrator in Active Directory (AD).
During a quota based archiving, running the Archiving Task makes a single pass through all mailboxes.
Therefore, by default, a maximum of only 1000 items will be archived in any one scheduled period regardless if the task is set to run 24/7.

Regards. Gertjan

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Dan_L
Level 3
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It checks each time the mailbox is processed. While this may not be the case for you specifically, that also can mean that If your archiving window is insufficient, some mailboxes may not be processed and archived back down below quota at all.

GertjanA
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To add to Dan's comment, you have some ways to sort of verify.

The Mailbox Archiving Report is a good start, you can verify if all mailboxes have items archived.

In addition, at the time of an archiving run, the MSMQ A3 queue is filled. This queue should get a number of rows which matches the number of mailboxes to be archived from that server. If A3 drops to 0 within the archiving window, you're good. If it remains then what happens is at the next run, the number is added again, and those lines not being processed in the first run, will be actioned first. There might therefor be mailboxes which will be archived only once or twice a week.

In the performance guide (I believe) also is a query which shows the archiving rate per vaultstore. That can give you an indication also of what is happening.

MSMQ queues are described in the Administrators guide.

Regards. Gertjan

Monitor the MSMQ A5 queues every hour to check if all the mailboxes scheduled for archiving on each of the mailbox archiving server are completely archived or not.

I believe, in your case either

i) the archival schedule is insufficient and/or mailboxes are too large causing the A5 queues to not clear down completely

OR

ii) the archival policies are not setup correctly to bring down the mailbox quota limits enough such that the mailbox goes full before the next archival run

We make use of a Powershell script to check the pending mailboxes in A5 queues every hour and to send an alert to admins in case there are items (mailboxes) still left in the A5 queue even after the archive schedule completes. That is the first indicator of a problem.

To add to GertjanA's reply, A3 is populated only during a RunNow and A5 should be the one you need to look at. Correct me if wrong.

GertjanA
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Arnold, you're right. My mistake. apologies for confusion.

Regards. Gertjan

My archiving process is not insufficent, normally my MSMQ Messagecount is (under 5 ) empty. Easy to monitor with Get-MsmqQueue | where {$_.messagecount -gt 0} | select queuename, messagecount

Back to my inital question: while archiving, all mailboxes which will be processed will be stored once in A5 Queue. If mailbox is has been finished, mailbox is not under quota surveilance (because quota based archiving is an real-time process due to the very volative mailbox sizes).

In this use case, you have to start severall Tasks instead of running a task for a long time, I think. Am I right?

GertjanA
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Hello FLX,

Not exactly I believe. When a task starts, it puts the items in the A5 queue, and starts processing. When finished procesing all mailboxes, I believe it does not do a 2nd run, but waits for the taskschedule to initiate the next run.

You might want to investigate the average time it takes for the task to finish, and then adjust the schedule to run a few periods. (i.e run from 20:00 to 00:00, then from 02:00 to 06:00, then from 08:00 to 12:00 then from 14:00 to 18:00

I'll check to see if I can find something on this.

Regards. Gertjan

GertjanA
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Found:

General info on quota based archiving

This one backs my statement of the single run.

single run KB

This is archiving the mailbox to a percentage of the limit set by the Exchange administrator in Active Directory (AD).
During a quota based archiving, running the Archiving Task makes a single pass through all mailboxes.
Therefore, by default, a maximum of only 1000 items will be archived in any one scheduled period regardless if the task is set to run 24/7.

Regards. Gertjan

@FLX

A detailed explanation on the archiving task functionality is provided here https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH73381

As mentioned by GertjanA, you may use a staggered approach (run the task multiple times in a day with smaller archiving windows by tuning the schedules appropriately) to archive the mailboxes everyday 

OR

Optimise the archiving policies so that the mailboxes do not go full between each archiving run.

As for GertjanA's response, all items in a given mailbox which are eligible for archiving are processed by running multiple passes on the same mailbox within the same archiving run.

After each pass, the worker thread closes the previous MAPI connection, moves the mailbox to the back of the queue and processes the next mailbox in the A5 queue. Remember, as per 7b here Access to items in MSMQ are single threaded and are accessed 'first in first out'. When it encounters the same mailbox at the end of the queue, a new MAPI connection is made to the same mailbox to archive another 1000 items (or any configureable value you have set on the task properties), till all eligible items are archived. Until such time that there are no more eligible items left in the mailbox, the mailbox continues to remain listed in the A5 queue and is rotated to the back of the queue. You can verify this fact by referring the 'Passes of mailbox' column in the archiving report. More information available in #3 here https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.DOC6009