[ckershner]

I'm currently working on designing our BES 5.0 infrastructure. The plan is to upgrade to new VM servers, keep the existing database, and simply move the users from the BES 4.1.6 servers to the new 5.0 servers. We have over 5500 users on 7 BES 4.1.6 servers. I was thinking of the architecture would look like the following:

7 BES pairs:
BES01A
BES01B
BES02A
BES02B
BES03A
BES03B
BES04A
BES04B
BES05A
BES05B
BES06A
BES06B
BES07A
BES07B


All services would be installed on each server with one possible exception and that is the Administration Service.

Which is where I am having a issue. Would it be better to install the BlackBerry Administration Service on all of the BES0XB nodes to support HA of this service, or would it be better to set them up on their 2 dedicated servers using either a network load balancer or DNS round-robin? The reason I am asking this is I am just not sure how much of a load administration would add to the servers in this version and want to play it as safe as possible for stability.

To support additional users, I would simply add another BES pair as each server reached the 1000 user mark.


A Few Other Questions:
-How does this architecture look?
-Are there some standard practices or recommendations made by RIM or other communities?
-What did you do?


Thank you

[icontech]

For our environment we have 2 BES servers, 1 primary and 1 standby with the core components installed. We installed the Blackberry Administration Service on a separate server which will host BAS and Blackberry Monitoring. My thought was if you needed to restart a BES server or failover, you would not lose connectivity to the BAS.

I would be interested on other peoples input and/or experience with their 5.0 environments as well.

[JavaJunkee]

I created a BES Utility server, which hosts my primary BAS, Web Desktop Mgr and the Resource Kit tools. My Blackberry Monitoring Service is running on the BES SQL server.

I do have BAS running on all four of my regular BES VM's, as a backup only.

BES1a (primary)
5051b (standby)

BES2a (primary)
BES2b (standby)

BESWEB (Utility Server: BAS, Web Desktop Mgr, Resource Kit Tools)

BESSQL (DB and Monitoring)