Why I'm going to
Why I’m removing Enterprise Vault and deploying Exchange 2010
This is not meant to serve as a negative review for Enterprise Vault but rather as a statement of why it’s not a fit for my organization. Enterprise Vault certainly has considerable value it certain scenarios. In our case I feel like someone said “We need to archive mail” so someone found out that EV is “The best there is” so now we have it.
The only thing I want to be able to do is take old or user selected mail and place it into a container other than the users main mailbox. This is due in part to the way that users like to separate things into another “thing” (think PST files) for some reason a FOLDER called “archive” isn’t good enough. They have to clean out their mailbox because they think they’re doing me a favor. Other reasons include keeping main mailbox size small for performance reasons. We have several thousand mailboxes operating in cached mode at remote offices. 4 or 5gb OST files don’t run well on old computers, and neither to folders with 80,000 items that are not in cached mode. Damned if you do damned if you don’t.
In the last service pack EV released the Virtual Vault. This seemed like a perfect solution except for the fact that it keeps its own OST file as it needs to store a copy of your vaulted content. We’re designing a VDI environment that will be deployed over the next 12 months. Storing thousands of gigabytes of OST files across thousands of desktop hard drives is no big deal. Storing that much data inside user profiles in the data center isn’t the right answer either.
I know that users don’t HAVE to have virtual vault to access their archived items, they can use the Archive Explorer, but you can’t treat it like a set of folders, it’s a one way looking glass into your vault. You can’t delete, move, etc. I could archive and create shortcuts to all of the items. Overall this creates MORE data than if I hadn’t archived anything at all because now you have millions of 3kb shortcuts in mailbox, and archived data somewhere else. You can forgo the shortcuts and archive only… Then people need to search in 2 places if they are looking for something, and understand how to use 2 products to manage their email instead of 1. Teaching 1 product is enough work for IT staffs.
Exchange 2010 archiving solves these problems for me. Users have a mailbox, and an archive mailbox. I can store them in different places. This increases my disaster recovery SLA because I can restore everyone’s main mailboxes first, and the archive mailboxes later, if at all. (EV solves this too)
I can store the archive mailboxes on cheap sata arrays and the main mailboxes on enterprise fiber channel disks.
For all of the things that EV for Exchange does, it doesn’t do anything for us. Does anyone have anything productive to add to this? I’m not ranting and raving. Just a lesson in don’t believe all of the marketing material you see; for any product. I didn’t even talk about what a nightmare it is to import PST files into each users mailbox, or how much administrative overhead is involved in EV. If I were under some sort of legal discovery process and needed to provide ALL mail to an attorney, PST files, journaling, etc all in one easy to search location, EV is the business… but that’s not us.
Comments
couple questions for you
Hello Aaron,
Thanks for sharing your experience. You are correct, not everyone needs an archiving product and I definetly wish you the best of luck with Exchange 2010.
My question for you is why even bother? It seems like in your environment users could just Auto Archive to a pst and be happy. Was there a business requirement to get rid of PST's?
Also, you say you are keeping mailbox sizes small but then you mention 4 or 5 GB OST files, what is your target mailbox size for your users? (I am just curious)
Regards,
Tony
Tony Sterling
www.bluesource.net or www.bluesource.co.uk
Offices in the US and the UK
50 percent of mailboxes are
50 percent of mailboxes are around 500mb, the rest are between 2 and 4gb. I don't want PST files anywhere... ever. It makes the help desk staffs life really miserable when switching out computers, my life hell when dealing with file servers, they aren't available everywhere, etc...
The large OST files are in reference to the vault cache. It might not actually be an OST file, but it's some sort of local cache.
We don't exactly have a target size in mind. More like a performance metric. Lots of users are over a T1 MPLS network and changing from folder to folder when they have between 60,000 to 120,000 items can take a long time; very painful for them. Small mailboxes don't have this problem.
just as a matter of interest,
just as a matter of interest, how are you going to deal with users not having access (or even the choice) to their exchange archive offline?
We don't have many "mobile"
We don't have many "mobile" users so it's not that big of a deal. We have VMWare VDI for remote access so if someone needs it, they can get at it that way. Also, none of our users have offline access to their archive as it sits right now. So not offering it with 2010 isn't a big deal :)
Sorry to see that you have
Sorry to see that you have not decided on EV as the solution for your environment
I don't agree with your decisions but they are your choices.
I wish you well in your endeavor.
Liam Finn
Well, you can solve the VV
Well, you can solve the VV issue by adjusting your content strategy to headers only.
Content strategy (default = store all items).
Any setting that has a need for the content of the item to be available should be reviewed.
Content strategy is the setting that determines how much content is downloaded to end-user workstations that are vault cache enabled. The three content strategy options are:
Do not store any items in cache. Header cache information is synchronized, however the content of archived items is not downloaded and stored in the content cache.
Store all items. Header cache information and the content of archived items are downloaded and stored in the content cache.
Store only items that users open. Header cache information is synchronized, but only the content of archived items that are opened in virtual vault are downloaded and stored in the content cache.
As for the separation of mailbox & archive mailbox, you need to wait on Exchange 2010 SP1, as in RTM you can store the archive mailbox only on the same exchange database as the primary mailbox.
As for the PST Migration... why do you think that EV is an "administrative nightmare", and Exchange won't be?
I don't think it will get any easier in Exchange.
As for additional benefits with EV, e.g.:
- OWA access (don't know if Exchange 2010 provides access to the archive mailbox)
- "Google" like search features (for the User!)
- Information Lifecycle features (Storage expiry)
- Single Instance Storage (Your additional storage needs with Exchange will be huge, especially when you will use DAG)
- Archiving framework (you can Archive other things like Fileservers, Sharepoint...)
Just that you keep all these things in mind.
I agree that EV is not suited for absolutely everyone, but I'm confident that it's a really good product which can add real value to you and your Users.
HTH
Cheers
Michel
www.quadrotech-it.com - All your EV Tools
Since we're going to Virtual
Since we're going to Virtual Desktops, we don't want people in cached mode. We don't need to keep all of the mail on the exchange servers AND on the workstations. Cached mode needs to be enabled for VV to work, that's a big downside.
PST migration isn't easy, no matter which product or method you use.... the marketing and training material is a little deceptive about this.
File system archiving licensing is a bit expensive compared to EMC rainfinity, for example.
Andrew Still, this is not
Andrew
Still, this is not true, you can use VV without cached mode (since 8.0 SP3, I think):
Offline store required (default = yes).
Previously, end-users who did not work in Microsoft Outlook cached mode were unable to use vault cache as vault cache had a dependency on the presence of an OST file. The offline store required setting now enables an administrator to give vault cache functionality to end-users that do not have an OST. However, there is a difference in behavior depending on whether you have an OST or not.14
End-users running in Microsoft Outlook cached mode are able to utilize a trawler mechanism within the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-in, which actively trawls the contents of the OST looking for data that is soon to be archived based on the archiving policy applied to the mailbox. This data is pre-emptively copied into the content cache before the archive operation occurs. Therefore when the data is actually archived, no subsequent download of that content from the Enterprise Vault server back down to the end-user workstation is required, thus resulting in various resource benefits15. With this configuration it often makes sense to utilize the content strategy of ‗store all items‘ as this incurs little if any overhead server-side and the benefit to the end-user is a full content cache.
End-users not running in Microsoft Outlook cached mode are not able utilize the trawler mechanism. Therefore any content requiring download based on the content strategy policy will always have to come from the storage service, expending storage server, SQL server and bandwidth resources. With this configuration it often makes sense to utilize the content strategy ‗do not store‘ or ‗store only items that users open‘.
You should have a read on this document:
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Exc...
As with PST Migration, this is probably true ;)
I'm not familiar with rainfinity, but I can see a real benefit (including single instance storage) when using EV with Exchange & File system archiving, instead of using multiple products.
Cheers
Michel
www.quadrotech-it.com - All your EV Tools
This is an interesting thread, as i have been getting major heat from Sr. Management and our Exchange Admins to upgrade for the past few months to Exchange2010 from Exch2003. I have had to tell them the release date was May2010, to sometime this summer, to now August/September timeframe. it has gotten to the point where they are looking at Microsoft's archive solution. From my perspective EV is a much more mature product. I am not an Exchange Administrator so i do not have a strong knowledge of Exch2010, but i do not know how it can take this long for Symantec to support this product. Exchange2010 was in Beta a long time ago and has been available in production for awhile now. handcuffing the Evault customers is very taxing on the administrators.
That being said, we have a major financial investment in Enterprise Vault and it works great in our environment, so i dont see us moving to another platform. i have spent so much time finetuning the policies and importing thousands of PST files that it would be a letdown to walkaway now. it is just frustrating that i am taking heat for this from other IT admins that want to take advantage of the new technologies that Exchange2010 and Outlook 2010 will offer us.
Overall Evault is a great product and the support we receive fom tech support is excellent. this is just not realistic to expect customers to wait this long for support when Symantec claims to be such a close partner with Microsoft. Aaron, i feel your urgency as many others do, but going to a v.1.0 solution of Microsoft's archive is a risky endevor. good luck.
Kris, all my past employers and customers with EV are in the exact same boat. I couldn't have written what you said better myself.
Andy Becker | Authorized Symantec Consultant | Trace3 | Symantec National Partner | www.trace3.com
Hi Kris/Andrew,
Have your companies completed all the testing/planning of Exchange 2010 implementation?
Can you complete all the testing and planning when a major part of your messaging environment such as EV isn't compatible yet? If I'm following you correctly, I think you're implying that Exchange 2010 can be implemented but no mailboxes moved until EV9 is out. That being said, each company is in different stages. In fact, one has been "playing" with Exchange 2010 since the beta and is very eager to migrate while another is already upgrading clients to Outlook 2010 (actually all of the office suite) and accepting limited end-user functionality but they won't even talk about any effort to migrate to Exchange 2010 until they have EV9 in place.
In my opinion, there would be a lot of difficulty in scheduling and planning when you're depending on the release of a major product that requires its own testing an planning. Again, in my opinion I don't think it's practical to lay all the ground work then sit around and wait to finish the project until EV 9 is officially released, tested, implemented, etc. Not to mention waiting until 9.0.1 for Outlook 2010 support which means another delay to complete the Exchange 2010 project.
</rant>
Andy Becker | Authorized Symantec Consultant | Trace3 | Symantec National Partner | www.trace3.com
I'm not disagreeing that it would have been fantastic to release EV support for Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 on the day that they both released. Unfortunately that wasn't possible.
I was, clumsily, trying to point out that there is a whole TON of stuff to do, other than "just" upgrade to EV 9 to get into/onto Exchange 2010... training for staff, implementation of servers and the like... And much of that can be done whilst "waiting" for EV 9 -- I think that's what I was trying to say.
It wasn't clear, to me, what state that other aspect was at from the other posts in the thread.
As an Exchange admin running
As an Exchange admin running Exchange 2010 SP1 and EV 9.0, I can tell you that it has been a nightmare trying to get them to play nice together. EV does not understand what a DAG or a CAS array is so you must set up additional archiving and journal tasks for each mailbox server that you have. In the past, we could just point EV to our mailbox cluster and it would pick up the primary node. We have about 1600 users and our single EV server is completely bogged down because Outlook 2007 can only handle so many threads, then it starts throwing 3411 and 2216 errors saying it can't find a GC. I've had a case open with Support for a couple of weeks now. Meanwhile, our Journal mailbox is filling up and free space in Exchange is going down. It appears the only solution is going to be to add an additional EV server, which totally sucks.
We've been with EV for about 6 years now and have been through hell keeping this system maintained, especially through DR scenarios. As the Exchange admin of my company, I'm doing everything possible to push for moving away from this system to cloud archiving, specifically Exchange Hosted Archiving. If anyone has any comments or suggestions I would certainly welcome them.
Chad Pearson
cpearson@brasfieldgorrie.com
Honestly this type of
Honestly this type of scenario is why I would encourage users to get a really good lab set up, even if it's a few vm's, participate in betas when you can and get training as often as you can
It's true that ev isn't the easiest software in the world but a lot of issues I see customers come up against isn't helped by the fact people jump in at the deepend assuming that it will work one way or what not
I can say that within our environment we hve several test labs that have reacted favorably and easily to DAG arrays and have worked really well during failover tests, though you could argue it's just a test and a lab, we'll see how it comes out when we properly deploy 2010
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