When looking about spreading load then you do not really need to look at users per se but what you need to think about is what sort of throughput do you need to get all of the archiving done in the scheduled window that you have. So working from a performance baseline of 40K per hour on a quod system and taking into account the performance degredation you get from using vmware then you can build a picture of how many server you need from there.

Regarding moving your indexing to a seperate box then yes you can do this but the index service works hand in hand with the storage service so they would need to be on the same machine.

Should I open a new index location since I'm approaching 500GB in my single index location now?

I would say yes but remember that closing the index will not mean that it will not be written to anymore it will mean that new indexes will not be created in that location. As default now when you install an EV server it will create 8 index locations as this has been found to be optimal

I would recommend contacting our professional services department who can come in and perform a healthcheck and give you all of the best practise information that you would require to build an optimal system and these guys have more experience of implementing systems than I have trying to fix them.

I would recommend taking a look at the articles section of this website and finding the EV Architecture in a distributed environment document and I think there are also sizing documents on there as well. Lastly the performance guide is always a handy document to refer to.

Hi,

We're running fully virtualized (except for the index and storage disks) and have seen NO performance degradation. This might be related due to the fact that the VMWare ESX underlying hardware is a lot better, but we found performance actually increased.

I would definitely seperate journaling and mailboxarchiving. Also take into account that (as far as I recall) running DA on a virtualized server is not supported. (for whatever reason).

Healthcheck is a good idea, but expensive.

Opening a new index is good idea too
Create new mailbox partiton?

Good luck.

Gertjan

Brian

Slow searches and slow Archive Explorer both seems to point to your Index Location problem.
So, I don't believe that splitting it to multiple VM's will help you here, as I suspect that Disk I/O is the problem.

Before you go to vSphere, i'd suggest the following:

- Get more SAN LUN's for Indexing (as many physical disks as you can get)
- Split the Index accross those SAN volumes

You can move indexes for individual users to a new Index location, to distribute the load to as many disks as possible.
Just copy/move the index of a user to a new drive, and adjust the location in the VAC.

Or copy ALL indexes to a higher performance volume: 
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/273141.htm

Here's more info about index locations:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/294679.htm