Hey guys, long time no see. I got that silly work thing that keeps coming up.

I am currently looking to add a second (and eventually a third and fourth BES) BES to our current system as we are approaching 500 users. When i add the new box i was planning on applying sp3 to it immediately. I have not applied sp3 to our current system because it works well and we cannot afford the system to go down as we do financial based transactions over the BES.

What i would really like to do is to have both BES servers running and migrate certain accounts from the SP1 box to the SP3 box. These are basically email only accounts of which there are approximately 300 or so. Is it possible to do this? The utlimate goal is to not disrupt the process that needs to have high availibility. Please let me know your opinions/ideas/comments/concerns/philosophical entreaties....

Then simply setup the second BES server to use the same config database. That way the user will be unaware that they were moved to another BES. A single config database is key to maintaining and administering a multiple BES environment.
Unless of course you are using local MSDE, but then again if you can afford multiple BES servers you can surely pay for a SQL license.
This single database would also help if one BES fails (with mission critical users), then they can be easily moved over to another available BES server.

Yeah luckily the one nice thing we did was NOT USE MSDE.

In terms of simplicity, I'd stick w/ a single BES if you have less than 1000 users. Unless you watn a 2nd BES for Disaster Recovery (DR) purposes.

If you go the route of more than 1 BES, the suggestion of a consolidated Configuration Database is good. It make management and DR planning much easier.

RIM has a capacity planning calculator and performance whitepaper available at:

http://www.blackberry.com/knowledgec...se &sort=name

I think we have something like... 13 BESs. Each one seems to have less than 300 users on it.