[zfrawg]

I've been tasked with upgrading our email infrastructure, and as part of that plan I want to make our BES server redundant. Right now we only have one BES server in our West coast office, and with our new system we'd like to have two one on the East coast, and one on the West coast. What's the best way to do this, can you have two BES servers in different physical locations that access the same database? Or is there some other way to do this?

[knottyrope]

Originally Posted by zfrawg

I've been tasked with upgrading our email infrastructure, and as part of that plan I want to make our BES server redundant. Right now we only have one BES server in our West coast office, and with our new system we'd like to have two one on the East coast, and one on the West coast.

What's the best way to do this, can you have two BES servers in different physical locations that access the same database? YES

Or is there some other way to do this? depends on what you are looking for.

what is your lag ping time form east coast to west coast?

[zfrawg]

About 86 ms, although we're part of a much bigger company that has rig sites available on both the East and West coasts which have much more bandwidth. If we put the two BES servers in each of the rigs, the ping time would be much less I believe, although I don't know exactly what that would be.

[zfrawg]

I did have someone mention that you can choose the primary BES server on a per user basis, I think that would work for us, can anyone confirm that this is true?

[knottyrope]

BES 5 comes with HA and there is a primary server but all users are assigned to it.

you do need a clustered SQL database for it.

another option is to have half the users on one BES and rest on other.

Then if one goes down, you can swap users to the other server.

there are quite a few options

[cyclmpc]

We run two BES 5, one East and one West. DB is a VM on the West. It's very easy to move users back and forth. In our environment, we layer a product called MessageOne. This is more of an Exchange item, but basically we have an agent (deployed via BES) to each device. If we experience an outage with Exchange, BES, or the DB, we failover the Exchange server and all mail still gets delivered to the device.

Like knotty says, you have several options.

[zfrawg]

Ok, in the case of having our users divided between the two servers, I'm assuming if one server fails then the users need to be manually moved by an administrator over to the server that is still active. Is this a relatively quick process (I realize bandwidth is a limiting factor here)?

[ctpuk]

I've been looking into this for my own project.

If redundancy is the goal, why not have a pair of servers (primary and standby BES) at each site?

I think you'd need to run BMS too, but it can run on a low resource machine and monitor all the BESs. The only issue would be if your comms went down and the BMS couldn't see one of the HA pairs.

[knottyrope]

Originally Posted by zfrawg

Ok, in the case of having our users divided between the two servers, I'm assuming if one server fails then the users need to be manually moved by an administrator over to the server that is still active. Is this a relatively quick process (I realize bandwidth is a limiting factor here)?

As fast as SQL can process it and the BES act upon it.

[zfrawg]

Originally Posted by ctpuk

I've been looking into this for my own project.

If redundancy is the goal, why not have a pair of servers (primary and standby BES) at each site?

I think you'd need to run BMS too, but it can run on a low resource machine and monitor all the BESs. The only issue would be if your comms went down and the BMS couldn't see one of the HA pairs.

Actually that is something I hadn't thought of, might be worth looking into.