[BBPawn]

I've recently inherited the duties of a BES after our Net Admin quit. We need to install service pack 5 on a Windows 2000 Server SP4 box with BES 4.0.2 and my boss is asking for a length of downtime. I've told them it would be no longer than a usual service pack upgrade on most of the other servers, but they want proof. I don't have a test box for BES and I can't seem to find any information on install times. Any recommendations or insight?

[hannahkat]

You need to take a backup at least of your db - we actually take an image of the entire BES in the event of a software failure or corruption. So start your down time measure from the time it takes you to do the backup, as you should stop services prior. Download the upgrade files previously - make sure you have any other things (ie on GW we have to also update the client). The upgrade process is usually pretty quick, and service restarts etc are a matter of minutes. So, if you do all your prep beforehand your outage window should be less than an hour. HOWEVER, if you encounter problems and need to to a clean install or a repair, you will need about 4 hours including time to restore your backup db and/or image. At least, we did!
Hope that helps - from our experiences, anyway.

[BBPawn]

Little higher than I expected, but if that's taking backups into account I can understand.
So, the installation of the service packs and hot fixes shouldn't take too long aside from the disaster recovery stuff? I'm sure my boss won't like the answer, then again, they don't like anything.
Thanks

[BBPawn]

Okay! Just as an epilogue I guess. Went through the motions of installing the latest service packs and all the hot fixes. The longest part is we figured that it was a good idea to reboot the server every time it asked to (which was after every installation).

All in all it was a relatively quick process. Only about an hour and a half (backup of root directory on server included) to get the service pack and hot fixes all installed and tested. So far I haven't had a user come to me with an issue.

If someone is doing a massive upgrade like this one I recommend not starting the blackberry services until the very end and creating a full SQL backup before you start the process so when it asks if you want it to backup the SQL server you can tell it no. Next upgrade is planned to happen with a new server to host 4.1 for Exchange. Thanks for all the help.