Upgrading Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 to 5.x
 

Dear Experts,

One of our customer is having two blackberry enterprise 4.1 server for their domain mydomain.com with a total of 41 number of users. one of the server is hosting 20 users and the other server is having 21 users (They are having two SRP IDs). They are using exchange server 2003 as a messaging system. Since blackberry enterprise server 5.0 is proivding high availabilty, customer is very much interested to upgrade their current blackberry infrastructure to 5.0 with HA.

Please help me what is required for doing this implementation with a minimal downtime?

Regards,
Santhosh

Re: Upgrading Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 to 5.x
 

Most straight forward approach....

• Since all users are on the same domain, move all the users from BES Server B to BES Server A. This will leave Server B with no users on it.
• Decommission Server B; blow away the OS and reload everything from scratch. Operating System, Anti Virus, EVERYTHING!
• Then load BES 5.x on Server B using the extra SRP and creating a new BESMgmt5 database on a SQL Server.
• Use the Transporter tool to move your users from Server A (4.1) to Server B (5.x).
• After everybody has been moved off Server A, decommission Server A and reload OS, anti virus from scratch.
• Install BES 5.x on Server A as the High Availability Server. (Don't use the extra SRP as the installation will detect the current BES 5.x install on Server B)

Advantages:
No downtime for your users.
You'll use the SRPs available to you. In fact, you'll have an extra SRP left over in case you want to expand in the future.
You don't have to use the Migration Kit. (Cumbersome at times... just an opinion)