Enterprise Vault (Email Archival) Case Study

Project Drivers:

Due to the consolidation of Regional Councils, there was a requirement to continue archiving a Local Council’s legacy users, in conjunction with initiating e-mail archival for all other Regional Council sites. As such the existing Enterprise Vault Environment in place needed to be maintained during the consolidation, and new Enterprise Vault servers were provisioned to archive the additional Exchange servers that were now part of the Local Council Infrastructure, an increase of 4500 mailboxes, for a total of 9000.

In addition, all newly targeted mailboxes were to be archived before their migration to a new centrally located Exchange 2010 environment which would also be targeted by Enterprise Vault. This was to include ‘Journaling’ (capturing a copy of all email received by the organisation for archival), while maintaining the ability for users to access archived email via Outlook Web Access – as well as factoring in growth of resources and data over three years.

A tertiary concern was to ensure that existing Enterprise Vault Servers were able to migrate current archives to the new Enterprise Vault servers, and that support staff and teams were familiar with the additional options provided by later versions of Enterprise Vault.

Once the design had been completed - the solution was implemented in three phases:

Phase One:

Upgrade the current Enterprise Vault environment to the latest version of Enterprise Vault, to take advantage of Single Instance Storage.
A three step process from Enterprise Vault 7 -> Enterprise Vault 2007 -> Enterprise Vault 8 -> Enterprise Vault 9
Install new Exchange extensions for OWA access, via IWA
Upgrade SQL 2000 -> SQL 2008
Ensure successful testing and roll out of required new Outlook Add-Ins
Build three Enterprise Vault Servers (v9)
Provision hardware (Virtual)
Provision and attach storage
Join existing Enterprise Vault site

Initiate and deliver support training sessions for support teams and team leadersiod of approximately 9 months while they investigated a longer term solution.New Paragraph

Phase Two:

Run ESR (Exchange Store Reporters) on all Exchange targets in remote domains
Utilise this output to plan load-balancing of new Enterprise Vault servers according to number of users per domain and data required to archive
Target Exchange environments in remote domains
Ensure all requirements for network connectivity were met
Ensure bi-directional trusts in place between domains to ensure Enterprise Vault service accounts were viable
Ensure new storage has been correctly configured
Create new partitions of smaller size to facilitate smaller backup windows
Begin to archive pilot groups from each remote domain
Roll out OWA extensions to each Exchange environment dependant on version and version of IWA utilised (if any) at each site
Perform UAT to ensure accessibility of archived content across multiple domains and access points

Phase Three:

Migrate newly archived users to new Exchange 2010 environment
Ensure no user exposure to migration from EV perspective
Conduct through testing of migration process
Migrate legacy user archives to new Enterprise Vault servers
Configure ‘Journaling’ points
Confirm Enterprise Vault accessibility in the event of Exchange 2010 DAG member roll-over
Document all aspects of solution and consolidate documentation
Create and test Backup scripting