Enterprise Vault Best Practices for large installations

Problem

Enterprise Vault best practices are currently available cross-referencing multiple documents. Below is a consolidation of these documents, and is applicable for large installations.

Error Message

Issues that may be observed without the best practices implemented may include:

• Errors in the event log indicating database deadlock or connectivity issues.
• Exchange mailboxes not appearing to archive all items on a daily basis, with no apparent errors in the Event Viewer.

Cause

Performance optimization of multiple aspects of an Enterprise Vault environment is critical for larger customers. If the environment is not optimized and maintained, a large number of seemingly random issues will be apparent.

Solution

On each Enterprise Vault server:

1. Apply the following Reference Documents from the section below: 1, 2, 3, 4
2. Schedule all Enterprise Vault archiving tasks to run using a staggered schedule that is outside of the backup window for EV Vault Store or Index locations, and that is also outside of the SQL database maintenance window.

• Enabling the 'Use Site Schedule' option is not desired for larger environments

• Staggering the start times will reduce the impact on the SQL server running the Enterprise Vault Directory database.

• Example: Backup normally runs from 12AM – 5AM. Database maintenance normally runs from 5AM – 6AM. This leaves 18 hours of unimpeded archiving time. There currently are 54 Exchange archiving tasks in the environment. You can schedule 3 tasks to begin per hour (3 times 18 equals 54). Allow a run-time of each archiving task sufficient to process all mailboxes on the Exchange server. This will vary per server with the total number of archive-enabled mailboxes, but a minimum of 3-4 hours of archiving should be implemented per task, and monitored for sufficient run-time allowance.

 
On each SQL server:

1. Please apply the below Reference Documents: 3, 4, 5

• Document 5 (database maintenance) should be performed daily on the Vault Store databases, and weekly for the EnterpriseVaultDirectory database. (Minimum)

• On a monthly basis, perform the database maintenance with all Enterprise Vault services stopped on all Enterprise Vault servers. Note: This will prevent users from accessing archived items, so this should be performed during a well-known maintenance window.

 
Reference Documents:

1. Enterprise Vault Registry and Boot.INI best practices: https://www.veritas.com/docs/100021169

2. Enterprise Vault Antivirus Exclusions document: https://www.veritas.com/docs/100017720

3. Server Pagefile size set to listed Microsoft recommended value:

• Windows Server 2003

https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sysdm_advancd_perform_change_vmpagefile.mspx?mfr=true

Set both 'Initial' and 'Maximum' 'custom size' to the value listed as 'Recommended'

• Windows Server 2008

support.microsoft.com/kb/2021748

4. Disable all TOE, Chimney, and other 'offload' parameters on the NIC: https://www.veritas.com/docs/100023865

5. SQL Maintenance for Enterprise Vault databases: https://www.veritas.com/docs/100022023

Applies To

The configurations in this article are appropriate for large Enterprise Vault installations, which generally consist of multiple EV servers, multiple SQL servers, many archiving tasks, and often multiple physical sites.