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Testing Enterprise Vault FSA over a Slow WAN Link

Rob_Wilcox1
Level 6
Partner
A week or two ago I was involved in some discussions about Enterprise Vault, and a slow WAN link whereby the file server which was being targeted was at the other end of that link.
 
The resulting information and testing is actually quite useful, and I’ve presented it below:
 
In VMWare Workstation 8.0 I can limit the network bandwidth:
 
I have  5 Gb of mixed data on a file server (Windows 2003 SP 2)
 
 
I set things up with a T1 between the servers:
 
 
I created a 100 Mb file using :
 
fsutil file createnew test1.txt 104857600
 
I created a simple batch job called test.bat:
 
@echo off
echo %time%
copy test1.txt z:
echo %time%
 
The Z drive is already mapped to the EV server)
 
The file copy without the NIC restrictions in place took:
 
15:02:49.91
1 file(s) copied.
15:02:50.86
= 1 second
 
The file copy with the NIC restrictions in place took:
 
14:43:02.19
1 file(s) copied.
14:52:13.11
= 9 minutes 11 seconds (second run was 9 minutes 12)
 
I did the same with a 10 Mb file:
 
Without restriction:
 
15:03:08.47
1 file(s) copied.
15:03:08.56
= 1 second
 
With:
14:59:30.74
1 file(s) copied.
15:00:24.51
= 54 seconds (second run was 53 seconds)
 
There was no other activity on the server during the copy. The copy is command line based.
 
You do not need to restart the VM or anything like that to do the restrictions (or to turn them off)
 
Archiving that data
 
First of all a report mode run…
 
Without the NIC restriction:
Elapsed Time: 00:00:32
 
With the NIC restriction:
Elapsed Time: 00:03:21
 
Archiving it all….
 
Without the NIC restriction
Elapsed Time: 00:17:23
 
With the NIC restriction
Elapsed Time: 01:30:25
 
Summary
 
5 Gb isn’t a lot of data – and I was only arching *some* of that since I had a policy set to do PDF’s and Office docs. However even with 5 Gb you can see that non-LAN performance impacts the time it takes to EV to ingest that data.
 
Having said that it was pretty much fire-and-forget (compare that with the jiggery pokery of updating tapes, moving files around, manual steps and so on)