Hi,

we have an environemnt of 2 exchange servers and 1 BES. all located under the one domain.
exchmel is located in Melbourne and hosts melbourne users mailboxes and exchsyd is located in Sydney and hosts sydney users mailboxes, and BES is also located in Melbourne.
this has been implemented for some time and is all working fine.

recently we had an outage whereby the connection between the sydney office and hence exchsyd was cut off from the melbourne office.
during this outage, sydney blackberry users were unable to send and receive emails to their blackberry.

i presumed that if one exchange server was down then the other would effectively take up the slack. hence all blackberries regardless of which exchange server the user's mailbox is tied to, would still be able to send and receive emails. however as mentioned this was not the case.

is there somthing i can check or need to do? or is this simple a limitation of the architecture

thanks

The maiboxes a physically hosted on the Exchange server. BES checks the inbox. If an Exchange server goes down a) messages cannot get to that mailbox and b) there is no server for BES to connect to to check the inboxes.

thanks, understood.

are there top-level guides on how to go about setting up a BES server for exchange servers in different locations
eg like in my case, 2 different exchange servers in different physical sites - and setting up two BES servers, one for each of these exchange servers.

is it basically as simple as mirroring the existing BES , placing this new BES in sydney with the sydexch and moving the sydney users off the BES in melbourne to the new sydney-bes?

can the new BES use the same BESadmin accounts? or must i create a new set of admin accounts for the BES?

thanks

You can not mirror a BES and have it working, your SRP will get locked out.

You must buy a second SRP an install a new BES.
then remove users from old BES and EA on the new server, unless you have a SQL server that is clustered between the two sites then you could just move them from within the BB domain.

Or you could wait for BES 5.0 and some of these tasks will be easier.