Right now I am having an dilemma on weather to take the SQL server off the BES.

Currently I have:

4.0 BES (plus SPs)
650 Users
SQL server locally running on machine.

In your opinion what are the pros and cons of having SQL server running locally on the server or off?

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks ahead of time.

You should separate your BlackBerry Enterprise Server software from your SQL Server. That way, if your BlackBerry Enterprise Server crashes, you still have the BlackBerry database and you can install the BlackBerry Enterprise Server on another machine and point the installation back to the database. This would be seamless to your users. In the event that the SQL server crashes, you can have a backup SQL server and restore the database to this backup server. Once restored, you can point your BlackBerry Enterprise Servers to this backup SQL server with minimal downtime for your users.

If you're running full blown SQL Server you should be running it remotely. Locally you should be running MSDE.

Pro of having it locally: in theory greater user support if the server has enough resources, more mailbox agents will dynamically spawn by default.

Cons of having it locally: uses more resources; not sure if its exactly supported .. I know its not recommended.

If you've invested in SQL server, you'd probably want to make use of it as a shared resource and have SQL admins manage it.

Some linkies ...

MSDE workload governor

Increase mail agent limitation on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server when moving from MSDE to SQL Server

A major con of running it remotely in a shared SQL environment (with non-BES applications, such as Sharepoint) would be maintenance windows for those other DBs.

Recommendation: Dedicated remote SQL installation

Funny thing about that ... that's what I and our company always recommend, but the difficult part is justifying the cost when you get pushback and the customer indicates they have proper change management processes so any downtime they have would be acceptible.

I think this would actually be a decent poll question ... "Where is your BESMgmt database located?" or ... How many users do you have in your database and where is the database located?

What I've been told by my 2nd level support guys is that after 50+ users it's a good idea to switch to a seperate server because the server starts to bog down and have issues. My server was at about 120 users before this really started. Email would stop for 6-10hours and just general slow down and have problems with activating wirelessly. Rebooting just made it worse. This is for a Groupwise BES 4.0.

I'm not sure about Groupwise specifically ... but all things else equal and going with assumptions that RIM makes ... based on their documentation, you should have no problem with a few hundred users on MSDE locally.

There aren't reads / writes to SQL with every email, like you'd see in the Debug Logs, but running your database remotely puts you in a much better scenario from a recovery perspective.