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Configure New Store, storage , provisioning groups in Enterprise Vault in Exchange Environment

Enterprise Vault, Exchange2010, Exchange2013 November 17, 2015 Leave a comment

In this article we will have a look at the steps to provision the Enterprise Vault in the Storage, Policy and Group level.

If we talk about Enterprise Vault its again a big topic considering all the functionalities ,configuration , features , HA etc..,

So here we will focus only on how to provision archive only for end users in a new deployment

We will need to look at the steps to consider in creating a storage, Backup , creating policy based on the retention that end users are expecting.

So below things needs to be planned properly before the configuration:

a) Archive policy based on mailbox quota and number of months. eg: If the quota exceeds 80 percent and emails greater than 5 months should be archived.

b) Archive retention period for end users. How long the archived emails will stay eg: like 5 years, 7 years etc

c) Retention of the shortcuts archived items in the mailbox after the archive.

Once planning on the above is done we need to configure Provisioning group, Archive policy and create a store group and a store for the archive process to happen.

Below things needs to be created :

a) Create a provisioning group to target the users who require the archive feature to be enabled.

b) Create a dedicated policy for this group based on the requirement.

c) Create a dedicated store-group and store to place all the archive .

d) Configure the backup for these stores.

We will look into the steps to create provisioning group first

Give a name

Associate the targets for this group

Targets can be OU’s, Whole domain, Distribution Group. The best practice is to always target a Distribution group and add users who require EV since the OU’s will contain service accounts, vendor mailboxes which will unnecessarily consume licenses.

Then later you need to select the policy that you would need to apply for this group of users based on your requirement.

Set the retention category

Select the associated store and enable the option automatically provision the mailboxes for people who comes under this group

Now we will look in creating the Policy

It is better to have multiple policies since its always better to segregate users based on their quota, nature of job and the amount of emails they receive on daily basis.

To create a New Policy Open Vault Admin Console – Navigate to policies and create a new mailbox policy.

These are the default values once its created. Based on your requirement you can modify these values.

There is nothing much complexity involved in creating the policy but yes if the users retention is not understood properly then later you would be in trouble. So its better to set the clear expectations to the end users before setting the policy.

Now we should look in creating a store for the archived mailboxes.

Its better to create a store group first

Then create a Store under the Store group

You will get the below window

Give it a name and select the option whether open or closed. If you keep this partition open then partition rollover can happen if any of the other partition are full. If you keep it closed then rollover to this partition will not happen.

Select the storage type by default it is NTFS

Then you need to specify the drives and drive path and finally you have to perform the run test which will indicate a success or failure of your config

This is the partition rollover which i was taking in earlier screenshots which is an amazing feature

You have an option to set the volume and time

Here you go for setting the backup for this partition. The beauty of the archive is when you create the store by specifying the SQL instance location the DB’s are automatically created.

So now these values needs to be chosen according to the type of backup you are using.

If you have a snap shot EV unaware backup then you need to select the option check for a trigger file.

If you have a EV aware backup most likely backup exec from Symantec then you can use the first option.

Note: Its very important that you need to keep in mind that these backups will never help you in restoring brick level for end users. These are meant only for system recovery scenarios.

So when a user permanently deletes an archive from EV its gone forever.

Then you need to use the file collection software if you are using the second option

And enter the time at which you need to place this file collection software.

After this once you click on finish the archive is configured to take place.So based on your Archiving Mailbox server Task schedule the archiving job would start happening.

There are few more backup configurations that needs to be done if you choose the 2nd option. We will look that seperately in another write up since adding those information will definitely confuse and increase the length of reading this blog.

Thanks

Sathish Veerapandian

MVP – Exchange Server

All about enterprise vault services and its tasks

Enterprise Vault March 2, 2015 Comments: 2

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