[jimbob_]

Good morning,
I was just informed that the upgrade of our BES is going through this weekend. Part of the motivation is an open change managment shedule, and the hope of virtualization of the actual BES.

So the plan is to shut down services, run a P2V, then apply the 4.1.6 upgrade to the new virtual server. this lets us revert back to the Physical server if things go poorly.

the details: We're an Exchange 2003 shop, with about 350 BB users on a MS 2003 SP2 server. The DB is MSDE 2000. Ive backed up the Logs, the Registry, and the Configuration DB to networked locations.

I'm interested in any obvious gotcha's the crowd here may see.
TIA.
jimbob

[penguin3107]

Sounds like you've got everything covered.
They most important thing you should do (which you've done) is get a good backup of the configuration database.
As long as the DB is healthy and backed up, then you can recover pretty easily from anything that might go awry.
You should be fine.

[BitNetMonkey]

If the box has a Static IP; change it to Dynamic. Once the box is on VM, change it back to static. Will save you some registry editing. Running 4.1.6 on VM ESX 3.5 without a hitch. Good luck!

[jimbob_]

Originally Posted by BitNetMonkey

If the box has a Static IP; change it to Dynamic. Once the box is on VM, change it back to static. Will save you some registry editing. Running 4.1.6 on VM ESX 3.5 without a hitch. Good luck!

interesting. is the suggestion to change to Dynamic while the services are off, do the P2V, then go back to static before turning the services on the virtual box?

honestly, it hadn't occured to me to change the ip config at all. I wasn't aware of any problem with the ip addressing.

thanks for all the suggestions so far.

[BitNetMonkey]

I have not P2V a BES yet; instead only IIS and SQL. When I did it, I went head first though. I loaded the software, took three hours to P2V, than started up the new V and turned off the old P. In my head the entire time, I could care less if the P2V worked, my original P is running smoothly along. VM suggests that you remove ALL drivers/devices that are no longer being used (seeing how I no longer have RAID on the box, I uninstalled the RAID software). I restarted the box and brought it back online. Once online, I tried setting the Static IP and got an error stating that the IP was already assigned to another NIC. There is a KB article on how to resolve the issue; you have to remove two registry keys. From there, you set the IP and your back in action.

To clarify the head first comment; I didn't stop/start anything. I just skipped my regularly backup schedule for that server and went on with life.

[jimbob_]

Excellent, my Principle Network Engineer was very interested in my suggestion that we switch to DHCP, but pointed out that there is no DHCP on the Server side of our network. but he was impressed that we knew he'd have IP issues. he's converted many of our existing servers and has had to deal with this issue before. very nice.

thanks again everybody! I'll update on monday or beg for help sunday.

[jimbob_]

Meant to followup on this Monday...

Virtualization was held up by the KVM switch on the VM server, once that was resolved the BES migrated to the Virtual server and ran fine. I then ran the upgrade, and got "incompatible Version detected on system."

Got RIM support on the line, they pointed me at the full version of the upgrade and it upgraded with out a hitch. One little gotcha was that the Blackberry Manager icon didn't get updated to the new version and the old one works, but wouldn't allow me to Add Users or Resend Service Books (gee, what am I going to do all day?). Once I ran the new Blackberry manager all was well. Within a couple of hours the server was caught up and running fine. So far, no other issues.

Lots of new features to play with. Not to mention retraining my helpdesk.

[BitNetMonkey]

Cool! Nice to see that VM was the easiest part of that upgrade.