Hi all

Complete newbie to all this BES stuff so please be gentle.
From memory, when our BES server was installed very recently, the advice was to install the software on dedicated hardware.
We duly supplied a new server for the BES4.1 solution.

Finding that we are short on file server space I was wondering what impact there would be, if any, if we were to use the "spare" capacity on the BES server drive for file serving duties.

Details:

Current number of users/devices supported by BES = 10
Max likely in future - say 50
Server is Proliant ML310 P4 3200 2Gb RAM 68Gb HD with 60Gb free.

Considering using upto 30Gb for file serving.

Any comments gratefully received

Phil

I don't see any problem but I've never done it. Funnily enough I need to install a small BES on a small file server for one of my friends so I'd also be interested to hear the opinions of others on this one.

It should be fine, depending on types of files you'll be storing/saving there. There would be no issue if it was a separate HD.

the thing is, BES is really quite complicated and adding other applications to the mix will make your life more complicated if you need to do maintenance or reboot in a hurry.

why mess with success?

Been running BES on a file server for a couple years now. Currently about 100 f/s users and 70 BES users.

Can't say I totally recommend it, but in small companies with small systems, options are often limited.

I see in the 4.1 SP3 notes that VMWare virtual machines are now supported with BES. Don't know about Virtual Server 2005. A virtual server might give you the best of both worlds. A machine with your specs would be a candidate for a VM for BES, with the host machine used as the file server.