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Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning

Last Published: 2023-09-05

Product(s): Enterprise Vault (14.5)

How Enterprise Vault works

This section introduces the Enterprise Vault components and gives an overview of the basic archiving and retrieval processes. Enterprise Vault is packaged as a number of components, which you can select at installation time.

The core Enterprise Vault components include the following:

The Enterprise Vault Server component comprising services and tasks for performing the main archiving, indexing, storing and restoring functions.
The Enterprise Vault Administration Console for configuring and managing services, tasks, indexes, and archives.
Active Server Page (ASP) web access components for enabling users to access items in archives.

The following additional components are provided for Exchange Server archiving:

Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-In for enabling users to access archived items from within their Outlook client.
Enterprise Vault Client for Mac OS X for enabling Outlook for Mac 2011 or 2016 users to access archived items.
Office Mail App for OWA 2013 and later, and Outlook 2013 and later, for enabling users with these clients to access archived items.

The following additional components are provided for Domino Server archiving:

Enterprise Vault extensions for Notes and DWA clients.

The following, additional components are provided for file system archiving, SharePoint archiving and SMTP message archiving:

The FSA Agent, which provides the FSA services on Windows file servers for the creation of placeholder shortcuts, and for FSA Reporting.
Microsoft SharePoint components for archiving and restoring documents on SharePoint servers. Optional Enterprise Vault web parts provide archive search features for SharePoint users.
SMTP archiving components for processing messages from third-party SMTP messaging servers

The following optional components provide enhanced management and reporting facilities:

Enterprise Vault Operations Manager is a web application that makes remote monitoring of the status of Enterprise Vault possible from any computer on which Internet Explorer is installed.
Enterprise Vault Reporting provides enterprise-level reporting, using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

Once installed and configured, the Enterprise Vault Server comprises a combination of Windows services and tasks, Microsoft SQL Server databases and Active Server Page (ASP) web access components. Services, tasks and archives are configured using the Enterprise Vault Administration Console, which is a snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

Figure: Illustration of an installed Enterprise Vault system shows the main components in an installed Enterprise Vault system. The target server in the diagram is a server from which items are to be archived. The illustration omits the components involved in single instance storage, which are described separately.

Figure: Illustration of an installed Enterprise Vault system

$Illustration of an installed Enterprise Vault system$

The Windows services and tasks perform background tasks such as scanning target servers for items to be archived, storing the items in archives, indexing item attributes and content and retrieving items from archives.

The Enterprise Vault Directory database and Vault Store database are SQL databases that hold Enterprise Vault configuration data and information about the archives.

The Enterprise Vault Monitoring database is a SQL database that holds monitoring data for use by the Enterprise Vault Operations Manager and Enterprise Vault Reporting components. A Monitoring agent on each Enterprise Vault server monitors the status of the Enterprise Vault services and archiving tasks, and the values of performance counters for vault stores, disk, memory, and processors. The agents collect data every few minutes and record it in the Enterprise Vault Monitoring database.

The first time that you configure a file server target for FSA Reporting, Enterprise Vault creates an FSA Reporting database (not shown in the figure). The FSA Reporting database holds the scan data that FSA Reporting gathers from the file server. When you configure another file server target for FSA Reporting, you can assign the file server to an existing FSA Reporting database, or create another database. Multiple FSA Reporting databases can provide scalability if you obtain FSA Reporting data for many file servers.

The Active Server Page web access components run on an IIS server and enable users to view, search and restore archived items using Enterprise Vault web client interfaces.

The physical organization of the components will depend on the requirements of your site. The various Enterprise Vault services and tasks can reside on one computer or be distributed over several computers. In a pilot system, for example, all the Enterprise Vault services, SQL server, IIS server and target server for archiving can, in most cases, reside on one computer.

The archives themselves can reside on your preferred storage system, for example, SAN, NAS, NTFS, WORM. You can also use certain storage devices that support the Enterprise Vault storage streamer API. Older archives can be moved off to more economic media for long-term storage. Enterprise Vault can migrate files from a vault store partition to a secondary storage location on the cloud such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, Microsoft Amazon Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage.

The use of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is also supported.

For details of supported software and storage devices, see the Enterprise Vault Compatibility Charts.

Enterprise Vault organizes the archives in entities called vault stores. Each vault store can hold many archives, as follows:

If a vault store is used for archiving from mailboxes, you can create archives as needed, and Enterprise Vault can create archives automatically when it enables mailboxes. This gives you control over where Enterprise Vault stores archived data.
If a vault store is created for archiving from public folders, Enterprise Vault automatically creates one archive for each public folder that it archives.

A single vault store can be divided into a number of partitions, which can be on different disks or media. As a vault store grows, you can add partitions to extend the space available.

If you use the Enterprise Vault classification feature, you can archive different items to different partitions, depending on how the classification feature has tagged the items. For example, if you have configured the classification engine to detect and tag items that contain personally identifiable information (PII), you can choose to archive these items to one partition. Other types of items, such as bids and business proposals, can be archived to a different partition. These classification-related partitions are called smart partitions. They are identical to standard vault store partitions except in the following ways:

Using the Vault Administration Console, you can associate a smart partition with one or more classification tags that you have defined in your chosen classification engine (Veritas Information Classifier or Microsoft File Classification Infrastructure). Only items to which the classification engine has assigned the chosen tags are archived to the smart partition.
Multiple smart partitions can be open for archiving at the same time. This is not true of standard vault store partitions, which are limited to one open partition for each vault store.
You can configure a standard vault store partition so that Enterprise Vault automatically rolls over to the next available partition when certain criteria are met. This rollover capability is not available for smart partitions.

On NTFS volumes, Enterprise Vault automatically uses NTFS file security. Although some elements of Enterprise Vault can be set up on FAT volumes (for example, the indexes) there will be no file security.