I Just went through Enterprise Vault services, Tasks and its functionality. I have collected few points about its functionality and would like to share the same.

In this article we will have a look at the enterprise vault version 11 services and its tasks.

Basically EV version 11 has 4 services . The previous version 10 had 6 services and they have reduced it to 4 from 6 in EV11.

Below are the functionality of the 4 services.

Enterprise vault storage service

The Enterprise Vault Storage Service reads the objects from the Storage Archive queue and stores the associated mailbox items to the Storage Device.

What is storage archive queue?

This is the actual  queue which EV server queues the messages from the end users mailbox for archival.

It actually holds the emails that EV needs to archive in its storage.

It integrates and works with the windows message queuing service (MSMQ) and that’s the reason it needs to be installed on the OS during EV installation.

Once the items are copied to this storage queue the below process takes place

 

• The copied file from the user will be marked for archive pending.
• The copied item will be added as .EVSQ file in the Storage queue location. Usually the storage queue location should be redundant path (SAN Storage)
• Once when all the items are archived this .evsq file is emptied and keeps only the empty .evsq file(not sure why it leaves this file trace).

Below are the different types of queues

 

Enterprise Vault Exchange Mailbox task for server queue A1

This queue holds the Enterprise Vault Exchange Mailbox Pending items to update in the corresponding users archive. It also has the  failed operations.

 

Enterprise Vault Exchange Mailbox task for server queue A2

This queue holds the Individual items that needs to process. Used for end user manual archive requests and whenever Enterprise Vault cannot directly communicate with the Storage Archive queue of the Storage service.

 

Enterprise Vault Exchange Mailbox task for server queue A3

This queue is  Used if you start archiving using the Run Now option in the Administration Console. If the administrator forces the task to run then it comes in this queue.

 

Enterprise Vault Exchange Mailbox task for server queue A4

This queue is used during the retry of the failed archive.

 

Enterprise Vault Exchange Mailbox task for server queue A5

This queue is used during scheduled archive runs. This queue is not processed outside the scheduled archiving times, so you cannot use Run Now to clear a backlog on this queue.

 

Basically this enterprise vault storage service  has 3 tabs as shown below

General Tab

Just tells us about the site and the computer name and doesn’t hold much information

 

Storage Queue Tab

Tells the queue status open or closed, queue location free space and available space, queue total length and pending length.

 

Advanced Tab

This queue contains archive processes and restore processes.

 

Archive processes

It’s about the number of archiving task that this service can handle at time (can be exchange archive, SharePoint archive, etc..,)

 

Restore processes

It’s the same as archive and it is the number of the restoring task that this service can handle at a time

 

Restore thread per process

It’s the number of threads that the restore process must handle while restoring the items. We need to ensure that this value is increased when you increase the value of the number of processes else the restore will take long time.

Note:

We need to make sure that we are aligning the values for archive process and threads correctly else there will be some issues and will take time in the restore

 

EV Shopping service

This service manages the selected items to be restored when the end user manually chooses to archive few items through browser search and archive explorer. As the name indicates that this service is used only when the user tries to manually archive any items to EV from his end.

 

This service will log events in the event log whenever it starts and then stops. So it’s better to monitor this service events once in a while on every day.

Apart from this I do not find any much more information on this service

 

Enterprise Vault Task Controller Service

The Enterprise Vault Task Controller Service controls all provisioning, archiving, and retrieval tasks for Enterprise Vault. At the completion of every task it records an event about the status (whether it’s completed or its failure) of the task that was completed.

The Enterprise Vault Indexing Service:

This service is responsible to handle the indexing part for the archived data.

The Indexing Service will index items once they are being archived. Each archive will have its own index

It keeps the index all up to date.

Also it fetches the search results for the end users that they are searching for any emails from their EV archive

It’s better to have this functionality enabled as the end users will search for their archived emails for sure.

 

Tasks

Now we will start looking into the tasks functionality.

So these tasks will be working depending upon all the above services.

Below are the list of tasks that can be created from EV server for the applications as shown below.

 

And after we create a task these tasks have options to schedule and run on a timely basis which I find it to be very useful.

There are few more options to explore apart from the schedule

Note: We would be able to  set only one task for one server.

Example for one mailbox server we can set only one archive task schedule  and that task can be configured.

There are more topics to know on Enterprise Vault since it’s a pretty much complicated big product with more features and functionalities. We will discuss about the rest of the features in the upcoming blogs.

Thanks 

Sathish Veerapandian