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Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning

Last Published: 2023-09-05

Product(s): Enterprise Vault (14.5)

About Enterprise Vault indexing

To provide fast and efficient searching of archived data, Enterprise Vault indexes items as they are archived. An index is created for each archive. As items are added to or deleted from the archive, associated index documents are added to or deleted from the index. When a user performs a search for an item in an archive, Enterprise Vault searches the index, not the actual archive.

In Enterprise Vault you can set the required level of indexing. If required, different levels can be set for different groups of users. Two levels of indexing are available: brief and full:

Brief indexing. This level enables users to search on attributes of an archived item such as author, subject, recipients, created date, file extension, retention category and so on. With brief indexing, the content of the item is not indexed.
Full indexing. This level enables users to search as for brief indexing, and also provides content searching.

The more information that is indexed, the more disk space is required for the index. Table: Estimated size of index data shows the estimated size of an index as a percentage of the size of the unarchived item for the different indexing levels.

Table: Estimated size of index data

Indexing level	Estimated size of index
Brief	4%
Full	8%

At Enterprise Vault 14.2 Elasticsearch indexing engine was introduced. An Elasticsearch index is created for the items that are indexed using Enterprise Vault 14.2 or later releases. The indexes that were created using earlier releases of Enterprise Vault were 32-bit and 64-bit indexes. When a search is performed on an archive that has 32-bit ,64-bit and Elasticsearch indexes, Enterprise Vault automatically searches across all types of indexes. Newly archived items will automatically be indexed to Elasticsearch indexes.

Note:

Due to a limitation in the Elasticsearch indexing engine on wild card searches, it is recommended to provide a minimum of 3 leading characters along with the wildcard when dealing with searches involving phrases.

Example: Search criteria "Enterprise Vault indexing engine migrated to ela*" is better than specifying "Enterprise Vault indexing migrated to e*".

The Enterprise Vault Indexing service manages the various tasks that create, update, and search indexes. It interoperates closely with the Storage service to index items as they are stored, or later, and find items for the Storage service to retrieve. The Storage service converts items to HTML or text, if possible, and this converted content is then used to index the item. As Enterprise Vault does not index the content of items that cannot be converted to text or HTML, it is not possible to search on the content of such items. For example, the content of some binary file types cannot be converted, or searched. However, Enterprise Vault does index the attributes of items it cannot convert, so that items can still be found in the archive.

You do not have to install the Indexing Service on every Enterprise Vault server. For example, in larger deployments of Enterprise Vault the Indexing and Storage services can be located on more powerful computers to optimize search and retrieve performance. Associated Storage and Indexing services can reside on different computers. To ensure good performance, the connection between such computers must be fast.

Enterprise Vault servers that perform indexing can be grouped together in Index Server groups to provide scalability and load balancing.

See About Index Server groups.