Email archiving - how to deploy Symantec Enterprise Vault? Part 1

Email archiving becomes popular recently in malaysia. Many organizations face challenges in maintain their MS exchange servers efficiently and start to looking for archiving solution. Symantec Enterprise Vault is one of the leader product (6 years in a row in gartner quadrant). By implementing Enterprise Vault allows customer to move rarely used emails into lower tier storage. Meanwhile provide seamless experience to the end user (mailbox user). This will significantly save the capacity in first tier storage and hence reduce the load on MS exchange servers. After some times, IT department may find that they able to reduce number of exchange servers in their environment, and end user will forget when is the last time they need to perform housekeeping due to overquota. :) Win-win situation, isn't it?

So... how can i bring joy to the technical engineer? I will show how to deploy this Symantec EV in a neat guide thus save your life in reading manuals. What is the first thing you need to do is to create the Vault service account. Vault service account is used to run EV services and access target servers, and it has the most powerful permission rights. I will call it VSA.

Bear in mind that Symantec EV is running on windows environment with Active Directory.
1) Create a domain user account (Domain admin account will also work)
2) Assign VSA into local admin group in EV server, MS SQL server and target exchange servers. (Please do this even customer has already give domain admin account sometimes)
3) Assign VSA for Exchange Full administrative rights (this is for exchange server archiving).
4) Assign dbcreator and sysadmin rights for VSA in MS SQL server. (please refer installation guide if you don't want to assign sysadmin rights)
5) VSA account must be enabled and password never expired.

Yeah. I did mention MS SQL server. It is required to save the EV configuration data and metadata. I will normally install the SQL software with reporting services and workstation component.

Then you require a system mailbox in the exchange server.
1) one exchange server require one system mailbox.
2) system mailbox must have unique name.
3) system mailbox cannot be hidden.

To be continue....

Save your life in IT territory

All started by the onions show, a guy who was con by the sales guy and bought the BATES 4000, a PC that means future and nothing better, then found out this fancy 4000 becomes a rubbish when he just try to hook it up. Fortunately he able to kill the bates guy in the show.

This is a comedy show of coz. In IT world, this is really what I experience. Being an IT engineer for 10 years, I have met many customers and do many projects. All about these is just to cover their own ass. Sales over commit, consultant given the wrong design, project manager just care about his timeline, even customer don't know what they want. End up engineer had to work day & night to get the things work, is just like playing the puzzle. However, engineer is the one who getting the less paid among all.

I still believe this world has good guy, maybe somewhere so i haven't met them.
I know technical guy will sometimes being push to corner & everyone just simply put all the hopes on him and pray that he can make the miracle to solve all the technical problem. This is the purpose I open this blog and try to help them. At least bring some joy to this world.

I am specialized in systems infrastructure. If you have any problem about backup & archive, cluster, storage, SAN, server, UNIX... please share your burden with me (or maybe someone who see this blog). I will do the best to guide you out from the dark tunnel.