I run many different lab environments to support the work that I do both in the Symantec Connect community and for the company I work for. I see all different types and sizes of Enterprise Vault customer out there, and a question that sometimes come to mind is how can Enterprise Vault be deployed in small environments?
Say there are just a few hundred users. Up to 1000 even. What can you do?
Of course you can get a nice SQL server, and another server to host Enterprise Vault on. Plus a pile of storage for each server. In some organisations though space itself is tight, and the cost of managing multiple servers (in terms of time and resources) has to be weighed up against the elegant way to install things on different machines. I think for some people installing two servers (minimum) for Enterprise Vault is just not something that is 'easy' to swallow.
In these situations, maybe it's worth considering the lab environment-type configuration. An 'all in one' machine. If you get a well spec'ed machine with say 12 or 24 cores or more, and 48 Gb or 64 Gb of RAM (or more), surely that would be enough? Yes, it probably is in many circumstances. Of course you would need to do due diligence in terms of making sure the disk layout was well thought out:
- Different disks for SQL DB's
- Different disks for SQL transaction logs
- Different disks for SQL Temp DB
- Different disks for EV installation files (perhaps)
- Different disks for Indices
- Different disks for Vault Store partition data
In the end, I don't see why, even though it's against most best practices, that a small deployment of Enterprise Vault like this wouldn't work. Have you deployed anything like this, or been involved in discussion about this? Let me know in the comments below...