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Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning

Last Published: 2020-11-13

Product(s): Enterprise Vault (14.0)

How to plan installing the Indexing Service

There must be at least one Indexing Service in an Enterprise Vault site. However, there can be only one Indexing Service on a computer. If you have more than one Indexing Service in an Enterprise Vault site they must run on separate computers. It is usually best to install the Indexing Service on the same computer as the Storage Service.

Note:

For the Indexing Service to function correctly, you must install it on a computer whose year format is equivalent to the Gregorian year (currently 2020). For example, setting the computer's regional format to Thai causes the Indexing Service to fail, as the current year in the Thai solar calendar falls outside the date range that the service supports.

In larger or distributed deployments, consider using Index Server groups to spread the indexing load. Ensure that associated Storage and Indexing Services are either collocated, or can communicate over fast connections.

An Indexing Service can manage simultaneously the indexes for many archives, which may be stored in different vault stores on different Storage Service computers. The index locations assigned to the Indexing Service must have sufficient disk space to store the indexing data.

The indexes are organized as follows:

There is a separate index for each archive.
Each index consists of a set of related files.
Always back up and restore these files as a complete set; never restore only some of the files.
The number of files will both increase and decrease over time.
Files are held in folders; for most archives, there is one folder (index volume) for the index files. When an index volume becomes full, Enterprise Vault automatically creates a new one. This may occur for FSA archives, Exchange or Domino Journal archives, and Exchange Public Folder archives, but is unlikely to occur for normal user mailbox archives.

You specify during configuration the index locations where index volumes are to be created. If you want multiple index locations, you are recommended to spread them over different physical devices. (These locations are sometimes referred to as "index root paths" in error and diagnostic messages.)

If you specify more than one index location, indexes for new archives and new index volumes are spread over the locations. If you create Index Server groups, then indexing the associated vault stores is shared by all the Index Servers in the group. The index volumes are spread over the locations assigned to the Index Servers in the group.

You can choose how much information is indexed for items in an archive using the indexing level; this can be brief, or full indexing. If you want to be able to search item content for phrases, for example using Compliance Accelerator or Discovery Accelerator, then you need to use full indexing.

The more information that is indexed about an item, the easier it is to search for it. However, the more information that is indexed about an item, the more disk space is required for the index. The size of index data for an item varies with the indexing level.

Table: Estimated size of indexing data shows the estimated size of an index as a percentage of the unarchived size of the item for the different indexing levels.

Table: Estimated size of indexing data

Indexing level	Estimated size
Brief	4%
Full	12%

So, if you have allowed in the region of hundreds of gigabytes (or terabytes) of space for your vault stores, you are likely to require in the region of gigabytes (or tens of gigabytes) for your indexes.