Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning
- About this guide
- Introduction
- Overview of Enterprise Vault
- How Enterprise Vault works
- About Enterprise Vault indexing
- About Enterprise Vault tasks
- About Enterprise Vault services
- About the Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-In
- About Enterprise Vault Search
- Enterprise Vault administration
- About reporting and monitoring in Enterprise Vault
- Exchange Server archiving
- Exchange Public Folder archiving
- File System Archiving
- Archiving Microsoft SharePoint servers
- Domino mailbox archiving
- Domino Journal archiving
- SMTP Archiving
- Skype for Business Archiving
- Enterprise Vault Accelerators
- About Compliance Accelerator
- About Discovery Accelerator
- Building in resilience
- Planning component installation
- Where to set up the Enterprise Vault Services and Tasks
- Installation planning for client components
- Planning your archiving strategy
- How to define your archiving policy for user mailboxes
- How to plan the archiving strategy for Exchange public folders
- How to plan settings for retention categories
- How to plan vault stores and partitions
- About Enterprise Vault reports
About Enterprise Vault sites, Directory, and Directory database
During its initial configuration, each Enterprise Vault server must join an Enterprise Vault site. A site comprises one or more Enterprise Vault servers running one or more Enterprise Vault services and tasks to archive items from specified targets: for example, Microsoft Exchange Servers, Domino mail servers, Microsoft SharePoint Servers, and file servers.
A site also contains a collection of vault stores, index servers, archiving policies that define how and when items are to be archived, and Retention Categories and Retention Plans that define how long items are to be stored before being deleted. A site may also include a list of target computers for the automatic importing of PST files.
An Enterprise Vault site is located in an Enterprise Vault Directory on an Enterprise Vault server computer. An Enterprise Vault Directory can contain one or more sites. The hierarchy of the sites, and Enterprise Vault servers belonging to those sites is shown in the Enterprise Vault Administration Console.
Figure: Enterprise Vault Administration Console showing the contents of an Enterprise Vault Directory illustrates how the Enterprise Vault Administration Console shows the contents of an Enterprise Vault Directory.
Figure: Enterprise Vault Administration Console showing the contents of an Enterprise Vault Directory
When you configure an Enterprise Vault server for the first time you can either create a Directory and site on the computer you are configuring, or join a site in a Directory on another Enterprise Vault server computer.
The Enterprise Vault Directory is accessed by a Directory Service. The other Enterprise Vault services and tasks use this service to access the configuration information in the Enterprise Vault Directory database.
See Introduction to the Directory Service.
The Enterprise Vault Directory database holds configuration information for each site in the Directory. (In general, configuration information is not shared across Enterprise Vault sites.) This SQL database can be located on a computer separate from the Enterprise Vault servers.
The Enterprise Vault Directory, sites, index server groups, targets, policies and Retention Categories and Plans are all configured using the Enterprise Vault Administration Console. You can use Microsoft SQL management tools to help with managing the SQL database.