Balance user across mutiple message stores

[luba.maisterrena]

Hi,

I am implementing some 3,000 mailboxes and have 2 Unity servers and 5 Mailstore servers. What is Cisco best practice? - evenly distributing the users across the associated mailstores or dividing departments across the mailstores so that if a mailstore goes down the entire department does not or just load up each mailstore and let the systemgo to the next mailstore when the 1 is full.

If the best practice is to control the distribution of the users across the associated mailstore, then how do I do that? The CSV file does not have a column for mailstore.

Help me please,

Luba M

[afuller]

What are those two unity servers doing? Failover or are they individual servers? There's a lot of information missing here that would be helpful. Are all seven servers going to be at the same physical location? Is everyone going to be in the same active directory? Is this voice mail only or unified messaging? Will you be using Domino or Exchange for the message store? If it's exchange, are you going to be doing exchange clustering? Then comes the part of how you wish to group your users: geography, departments, shoe size, etc.

It's important that you first roll out a stable domino/active directory environment. Since we absolutely rely on the stability of the underlying infrastructure, whatever is Microsoft/Lotus best practice because Cisco best practice.

adam

[oliviers]

Yeah, these are good questions. Kinda along the same lines that Adam is talking about; there's more to ensuring performance than just the location of Unity subscriber mailstores.

For now, I'm going to assume we're talking about Exchange.

If you take a simple look at a few Unity servers connecting to multiple Exchange servers, as far as Untiy is concerned, what's more important than a spreading users over mutiple Exchange servers is the network connectivity between Unity and any given Exchange server. Faster is better.

I can't really see how spreading Exchange users over a few Exchange servers is going to reduce load on Unity. It will however, reduce the load on Exchange. Along with the "faster is better", formula, there's another important formula to remember: happy Exchange = Happy Unity, UnHappy Exchange = UnHappy Unity. It sounds silly but it's true. If you tax out one Exchange server, whenever Unity "talks" to that Exchange server, you can wind up with Unity delays in MWI, message sending, message retrieval, etc...

However, spreading the Unity subscribers over a few Exchange servers, does help in the fact that if one Exchange server takes a dive, then not every Unity subscriber is affected.

There are some "best practices" documents out on CCO with regards to Unity and Exchange (E55 and E2K). Some of these include setting up storage configuration.

For a general idead of Unity and E55...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_implementation_design_guide_chapter09186a00801187c7.html

For a general idead of Unity and E2K...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_implementation_design_guide_chapter09186a00801187c6.html

For Unity/Exchange storage best practices...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/prod_technical_reference09186a00800a5b6c.html

It's a complicated quesiton, but these docs are a good starting point.

[luba.maisterrena]

Hi Again,

I have read all the documents you have suggested.

The basic question is - Can the CSV file be made to assign a subscriber to a specific mailstore?

If it is not the CSV file, then what tool can I use?

Thanks,

Luba M

[oliviers · Accepted solution]

You can't define that in the CSV, but you can still define the location to be somewhere and run the CSV. When doing a CSV import for subscribers that do not currently have Exchange email boxes, Unity will create the mailboxes in the store location that was chosen duing the second part setup of Unity (also called UnityConfiguration -- 3.X, and Message Store Configuration Wizard -- 4.0)

To verify where that mail store location is:

1. Open CommServer\TechTools\DohProptest.exe (just hit "OK" for the password and then "ignore")

2. Press the "AD monitor" command button.

3. Select the Domain for which the users are located in the "Domains" window.

4. Select "MAILBOX_STORE" from the "Parameters" window.

There's a blurb in the documentation about where the email boxes will be created during a CSV import here...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_administration_guide_chapter09186a0080080e5b.html#xtocid153143

If you wanted subscribers to have mail store locations that are different AND you want to create them via CSV, you would have to run multiple CSVs and change the mailstore creation location. What's the Unity version again?

[luba.maisterrena]

3.1(5).

Many Thanks,

I will be trying this next week with my next lot.

Luba M