V2V / Performing a Virtual Machine Import on the BES

[SteveE]

In our environment, we are running VMWare 3.5 and our BES (5) is virtualized. We would like to increase the size of our system volume, and the way we usually do this is a live V2V with the only downtime being the final cutover.

Has anyone else done this with a BES before? Has it responded well? Since everything is stored in an external SQL database, I would think it would be okay, but you know how BES can be.

[penguin3107]

I've done this twice, exactly as you're describing. Pretty simple. (Just make sure the new BES isn't running at the same time your old BES is... for obvious reasons.)

[SteveE]

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'll report back here next week once we perform this maintenance.

It was necessary when we tried to install MR3, which has more aggressive space needs.

Fun fact, if it runs out of space and rolls back, you'll need to reregister some of the EWS components:

C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server>"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\regasm" /tlb ews.dll

C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server>CalHelperWS /regserver

Fortunately the RIM support agent I talked to caught it quite quickly and we were able to get back functionality in MR2-land.

Another fun unrelated fact (in case this thread ever comes up in a search) - if meeting invites are coming in as pure emails to your BlackBerry inbox, make sure you have the following attributes set on your mailbox:

Set-CalendarProcessing <Identity> -AddNewRequestsTentatively $true

(that's $true by default anyway)

Set-CalendarProcessing <Identity> -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $true

(not default, but allows for meeting requests outside your organization to be accepted from the inbox).

I didn't realize the meeting has to be on the calendar already in order for the options to be available from the inbox.

Steve