Whats Your Setup?

[SimonMac]

Just thinking if our setup is the most effiencent way of doing things, so want some advice on how other people have theres setup.

We have 2600 users on 6 servers (BES4.0.3 HF4) + 1 Test server (4.1), a seperate attachment server and SQL server.

All the servers are in one location and am thinking of moving them to our other site and having 4 user servers and one SQL server (which will also have the attchement server installed) at each site?

What do you all think? How have you setup yours?

[Kablooey]

I am not sure what your SQL server horsepower will be, but you may want to redress that particular configuration model.

We reviewed the white paper information from RIM-http://www.blackberry.com/knowledgecenter/livelink.exe?func=ll&objId=1181843&objAction=browse&sort=name
then decided that the best configuration to support a 25,000 user network would be the following-

Twin Xeon processor servers w/4 Gb of memory for each 2000 users connecting into a clustered SQL database
The SQL servers would have twin Xeon processors and 2-4 Gb of memory clustered on a SAN array with 1 server in the cluster for every 2 BES servers.
To make the environment high availability, we plan to install 1-2 BES servers as cut-over servers in case any of the production units fail...minimizing user downtime.

This setup provides scalability with a high availability platform which is centrally located and easily managed.

[SimonMac]

Each of our "user" servers are Dell PowerEdge 2650/2850 with with 2 x Xeon 3Ghz and 4GB Ram, our SQL server is a Dell PowerEdge 6650 with 4 x Xeon 1.9GHZ and 4 GB Ram. Were are thinking of getting the same SQL server for our 2nd site and replicating between the two so if we lose a site we can then just move everyone across.

Has anybody tried using the SQL server as the attachement server as well? Is it possible to do this? We rarely use attchemnts on out devices so it seems a waste of a server to have it standalone.

[Daiz]

Hi SimonMac,
I have not seen this done nor done it in a test environment. However I would recommend against is as both applications can get quite memory hungry. If you were going to do this then perhaps something like a dual CPU/core Opteron system with 6-10GB RAM that can be effectively used by the AMD archietecture and then set SQL's memory usage limit to 4-5GB

[Kablooey]

I would agree with Diaz. The purpose to moving the Attachment service to its own box is that it caches the documents it opens in memory which can be problematic if you have a large userbase that access attachments at the same time (i.e. Friday paychecks, retirement flyers, etc.). SQL can also be very memory intensive so I wouldn't think it would be a good fit.

[SimonMac]

Thanx for the info guys, looks like I'll be keeping them seperate.

[SimonMac]

We decided on 2 BES's + 1 Attachement Server on each site connected to a SQL Database clustered on a server at each location.