New Zealand | Using Amazon.com as Secondary Storage for Enterprise Vault

Indrajit (Freddie) Bulsara - 26.09.202220220926

Using Amazon.com as Secondary Storage for Enterprise Vault

New Zealand | Using Amazon.com as Secondary Storage for Enterprise Vault

In one of my previous projects, I had the opportunity to work on consolidating and upgrading the Veritas Enterprise Vault (EV) and Discovery Accelerator (DA) platform for a customer.

The consolidation project involved reducing the number of EV servers performing journal and mailbox archiving roles. The user mailboxes were already migrated into the Microsoft 365 (M365) Exchange Online (EOL) platform.

The EV platform was to be maintained until all the archive data was migrated into M365. The customer was also required to keep the SMTP Journal archiving for compliance and discovery purposes. Besides this, the application needed upgrading from version 12.1 to 14.1 to stay in line with Veritas support requirements.

The environment had about 90 partitions configured with ‘Amazon S3’ object storage as secondary storage. EV archive data was moved to secondary storage from the primary storage attached to the server. This provides a cost-benefit and reduction in management overheads. 

A weekend of consolidation work involved rearranging and consolidating the vault store and index data by following a list of Veritas tech notes to do the same. This work was labour intensive but went through smoothly reducing the EV server footprint from eight to four.

After a couple of weeks of planning and ensuring all the prerequisites for a hardware migration from version 12.1 to 14.0, the EV environment was completed. New servers were built on Windows Server 2016 and EV 14.0 binaries were installed, firewall rules for accessing the secondary storage, SQL servers and AD Infrastructure were tested and confirmed to be working.

The migration steps went through smoothly and we were successful in migrating the application from version 12.1 infrastructure to 14.0 infrastructure using EV – Server Settings Migration Wizard (14.0). Testing showed the application was working as expected and DA searches returning results and archived items could be accessed.   

However, after a period EV application would start to get unstable and storage services and indexing services started logging errors. Some timeout errors and OST Streamer errors were getting logged. I also discovered the export function of the DA application would stall and no matter how long we waited, it would not complete.  

On investigation, we discovered the S3 storage connectivity test failed from the EV admin console. At least we knew where the issue was and why the EV application was misbehaving after a period.  We reconfirmed the firewall rules were configured correctly, and a successful test was returned by Telnet and Test-NetConnexion PowerShell commands from each one of the EV servers.   

We then tested accessing the ‘Amazon S3’ storage using the S3 Browser tool, from one of the EV servers using the same Storage Server Name, Amazon Secure Access Key ID and Amazon Shared Secrets. To our delight, this test was successful thus ruling out a misconfiguration of the Storage Server Name and Amazon Access Key and Secret Key. However, this confused the matter further and everything was pointing at version 14.0 of the EV application as exactly the same configuration was working with version 12.1.  

We logged a call with Veritas, and after escalating and pressing hard to get the product development team involved, we were asked to try and use “Amazon.com” as the Storage Server Name instead of the existing “S3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com” value.

After changing the value within the EV Admin console and a successful S3 storage connectivity test, EV started to be more responsive and DA exports (which were stalled), completed automatically. Note: All 90 partitions were required to be reconfigured and tested.

After all this was said and done, it was a great lesson looking back in hindsight, but can I just say; what a journey this has been because this fix was not advertised (until now!)!

So it’s come to that time of the blog to say “till next time”, and as always, if you need any recommendations or insights on Enterprise Vault, Microsoft Exchange, file systems, or anything else within our Professional and Managed IT Services, please contact us

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New Zealand | Using Amazon.com as Secondary Storage for Enterprise Vault

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New Zealand | Using Amazon.com as Secondary Storage for Enterprise Vault

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