BlackBerry® Enterprise Service 10

[dmxop]

Hello

I am currently investigating the options with BES 5 high availability and have a few questions I hope someone may be able to answer.

We would like to implement high availability across two well connected datacenters.  The datacenters do not suffer from high latency.  After reading the planning documentation it seems this is possible.  I was thinking of the primary active BES server is datacenter 1 and the passive BES server placed in datacenter 2. 

I am unsure how the pool and instances are configured.  Would I be correct carrying out a complete install of all instances in both datacenter 1 and datacenter 2.  Can one instance failover and not the complete server whichy will mean some components are in datacenter 1 and some in datacenter 2?  Or can it be configured to completely failover if only one instance fails?

Hopw someone can help

mark

[ScRaSh]

Ok, first... the BES HA can do a failover for a component (recommended only if the component is remote) or a complete bes. In the case of a fail the demote process shut down the first server and promote the second server.

Both BlackBerry Enterprise Server instances in the BlackBerry Enterprise Server pair include, by default, the BlackBerry Attachment Service, BlackBerry Dispatcher, BlackBerry MDS Connection Service, BlackBerry Messaging Agent, BlackBerry Policy Service, BlackBerry Router, and BlackBerry Synchronization Service components.

So in the case of a failover all the components run in one server of the pair.

Also you can make a BB DB work with HA, using SQL 2005 mirroring.

SQL 2005 mirroring requires the use of a third server instance, known as the witness. This witness is an optional instance of SQL Server than enables the mirror server to recognize whether to initiate an automatic failover. Unlike the two partners, the witness does not serve the database. Supporting automatic failover is the only role of the witness. Should the principle configuration database fail, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server components are designed to automatically connect with the mirrored database.

[dmxop]

Many thanks for your help.  Regarding the SQL mirror, is it possible to use a SQL cluster?  The documention does not mention it.

Thanks

[ScRaSh]

Good question, next week I will try a similar environment. I think it should work.

[CerealBypass]

It's not officially supported, but I've seen it work.

If BlackBerry Support suspects that a given issue is a result of clustering, they would have to check to see if the issue reproducible in a supported environment before it could be escalated to dev.

[Shamrock]

If your 2 data centers are on 2 different networks, you may want to do some testing.  I was told by someone at RIM that we could setup our HA environment across 2 different sites/networks.  I then set things up this way only to find that right now I have a BES HA setup that doesn't really work.

[Lion77]

Hi DMXOP..

Yes you can setup a cluster for SQL..

Cheers!!

[Lion77]

Hi.. I'm about to imlement 3 blackberry (primary) servers using the same configuration database. Should i create IT policies and admin groups in all the servers??

Cheers!!

[knottyrope]

You only need to create one since all 3 share a caommon database.

then creat inheritance policies to define groups if you need them

[CerealBypass]

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Lion77 wrote:

Hi DMXOP..

Yes you can setup a cluster for SQL..

Cheers!!

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SQL clustering is considered best effort. It will work as long as any SQL failovers are transparent to the BES. BES does fully support SQL mirroring.