Hello all,

Just wanna share the useful information after talking to an experienced BES admin the other day.

If you have many BESes in your organisation (in my case Domino servers), try grouping them logically by geographical location as you would group them for your mail servers when planning and deploying them. Why? Because RIM recommends that BES should be as close to its users mail servers as possible.

Next, prepare the number of SQL servers that will serve the same number of groups. Install your BESes in a group and designate a BESMgmt database so as to form a BlackBerry Domain.

E.g. 1
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BES_US_01, BES_US_02, BES_US_03 <=> BESMgmt (SQL_US_Server)

E.g. 2
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BES_HK_01, BES_HK_02, BES_HK_03 <=> BESMgmt (SQL_HK_Server)

Now, if in the event that BES_US_01 is totally toasted and cannot be started. What would you do? You will be glad that you have bind all the US BES servers under the BESMgmt (SQL_US_Server). Why? You can use the "move user" function to move all your users from BES_US_01 to either BES_US_02 or BES_US_03.

This is a good and clean DR strategy. But there is a catch. Apart from the obvious extra SPR IDs that you require, the user move is called a sourceless move as the source BES Domino is offline. What you need to do before the move is to temporary turn the destination BES offline, after moving the user, copy their state databases over to the destination. Finally, restart the BES. It will initialize those moved users as if they are already on it before.

I think this is quite a good DR strategy although it is a little manual but pretty straight forward.

Just sharing. If others have experienced a DR situation and your solution is better, do share.

Cheers,

That is great info. Can you go more into details on the move? We are running exchange 2003. We are running two servers (two SRP's) with two local databases. We want to move to running one shared database for DR purposes.

According to you, if one server goes down, we need to bring the other server offline to move the users over. This isnt really a great solution. Is there a way around this? Can you elaborate on the process?

You wanna do this ...

How to merge BlackBerry Configuration Databases

This DR is only taking into consideration the BES and not your mail systems .. we have everything fully replicated and I have my production BES cloned with services off (same name, SRP etc)

SQL is making a copy everynight to the DR SQL as well the netbackup copy. So in the event of a DR I restore off the last backup .. start services .. viola.

Now I cannot wait for full HA clustered environment that BES 5.0 is hyping but considering their delays lately it might not make the inital build.

We have an agent that populates newly created state db's on our backup server, so no manual intervention required, just move the accounts.

Yeah, the DR I described is on BES DR.

And yes I'm excited about the BES 5.0 Argon that support SQL replication. Then my DR plan will be a complete one!!!