[Jay247]

Hi guys,

I am hoping you can shed some light on the order of tasks to undertake for a BES 4.1 to BES 5.0.2 upgrade parallel with an Exchange 2003 to 2010 migration we are going to do.

The current infrastructure is:
All 300 users are currently on Exchange Server 2003 out of which nearly all users have Blackberry devices no more than 18 months old. The BES version is 4.1 and all components are on the one server, with the MSDE Database on the same server. There is no current database mirroring or DR Server for BES.

The proposed infrastructure which we have decided on is:
Upgrade (and mailbox migrations) to Exchange Server 2010,
The new BES server will be version 5 with SP2. We will have a DR Site (Lets say Primary site is London, and DR site is Calgary); There will be 1 BES Server in London and 1 in Calgary.

Both, Primary and DR, sites will have separate SQL Server 2008 on separate servers (so 1 SQL on each site). These SQL servers will host the BES Databases - with Mirroring (for High Availability) from the Primary site to the DR site.
So basically, the BES environment will be in an 'automated failover configuration'.

I have seen a document on the 'Knife Edge Cutover' migration for BES. But it lacks in detail regarding doing an upgrade on another server then configuring that server for High Availability.

Could you please help me with this solution, in particular these questions:

- What is the specific order of tasks to do the migration from 4.1 to another server on same site and then have a DR BES box configured on another site? (I think we will have to take a back up of the MSDE DB and import/restore it on the new SQL server... do we do the same for the DR SQL Server too?)

- Can we have BB users active on both servers (BES v4.1 and 5.0.2) at the same time or will we have to turn the services off on the 4.1 server and 'migrate?' them over to the new 5.0.2 BES Server in one go?

- At what point do we configure the HA mirroring on the SQL Servers?

- For anyone with experience on Exchange migration with BES, at what point would you migrate the user’s mailbox from 2003 to 2010 in regards to their BB device?


The end result we want is: all BES user accounts migrated to the new 5.0.2 BES solution and the BES servers to be highly available with SQL Server 2008 between a Primary and DR site.

Thanks in advance for your advice and comments (sorry if I’ve repeated myself!)

Jay