BlackBerry® Enterprise Service 10

[Beholder]

This thread has been set up to facilitate further discussion of the High Availability article that appeared in the May issue of Solve. Solve is a monthly technical support newsletter that is distributed to RIM’s Technical Support subscribers. If you have a question about High Availability, please post it below.

[Shamrock]

With the new HA options, can you have your stand-by BES in a different site (same AD forrest/domain)?  Can they be on different subnet?  If so, has anyone tested this setup out?  How does it perform, and how quickly does it failover from one site to another.

I'm looking not only for high availability, but also site resilicency.  Does BES 5.0 offer that?  If we could have a main BES with a standby BES in another site that would essentially kill two birds with one stone for us.  Is it possible?

[phamhoang]

Can you tell me if we can control (or manage) the HA through a script or a programming interface (like a connector C#, JAVA or others) ? This will be interesting for a BlackBerry adminitrator who want to programme or schedule the availaility of their BlackBerry servers.

[AndyDufresne]

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phamhoang wrote:

Can you tell me if we can control (or manage) the HA through a script or a programming interface (like a connector C#, JAVA or others) ? This will be interesting for a BlackBerry adminitrator who want to programme or schedule the availaility of their BlackBerry servers.

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"schedule the availability" ... such as planning downtime / upgrades?  You can do some basic testing with stopping / starting services.

[osnabrugge]

Shamrock, you can ddefinetly have your HA BES in a different AD Site and subnet, but it must be in the same domain forrest.  For best results, you are still going to need to ensure that you have good latency from your HA BES to your mail servers and obviously you need a DC local to the BES (it is a different AD site, so obviously you have a DC out there).

The HA BES will provide high availability and site resilliency if you place your HA BES in a different site, but keep in mind that this does not take care of the SQL back-end.  In order to provide site resilliency for your SQL server, you have to take care of this as well by using one of the following supported options:

SQL syncronous mirroring, SQL asyncronous mirroring or 3rd party data replication software such as Double-Take, Neverfail, etc.

Mirroring is supported with BES 5 and provides the BES some level of awareness and automatic failover capabilities to the stand-by SQL server, but in order to get the high performance asyncronous mirroring it will cost you a pretty penny as you need two MS SQL Server 2005/2008 Enterprise Edition licenses (approx 40,000 a pop).  The 3rd party data replication is supported, but the BES is unaware of the SQL standby server and it is your responsibility to setup the 3rd party software to update the DNS record of the SQL server to the IP of the standby SQL server to maintain BES functionality.

Sean

[mirmujahed]

Hi Guyz, I really need your help and advise regarding High Availability.

Firstly I will explain my present company BES setup, there exist 4 BES servers are 4 different location in different dommains but in single forest. Each has it own local MSDE database. Next month at one site the complete data center will be down for 7 days for re-construction in which case the exchange server 2007 and BES server will be temporary shifted to other site. The mail boxes of users will also be physically relocated.

In such scenario, I would like to know what are the possible options for high avialbility to keep the service up and running without affecting the users. Is it possible the BES 5.0 that we shift users from one server to another but in that case central SQL database might be needed. And what if I take the backup of current blackberry configuration database and restore it on a new BES server at the other site.

PLease help me out with the options . I will really appreciate your support in this matter. Thanks.

[abarnes]

Neverfail (my company) allows BES (including SQL) and Exchange 2007 to be switched from one location to another for this type of activity, it then allows the two to be switched back after the data center rebuild has taken place.

[Shamrock]

How many users are at the one location?  I know that you can definitely take a backup of that DB, and move it to a temp server, however if you take that route you may find yourself performing a bunch of enterprise reactivations.

[Silly]

With the 4 BES running their own MSDE you're pretty much out of luck for any move between BESs. 

Depending on the physical location, it might be easier to simply box up the BES (& associated MSDE, if not same box) and set it up at the new location.  I don't know where the Mail server is at so not sure how to fix that.  If possible this is probably the least troublesome way (other than re-assigning some IPs) and the trouble of moving the servers.

Another option is to start VM to mimick the live BES & MSDE - keep in mind that this would require the transfer of the database.

Good luck!

-silly-

[mirmujahed]

Thanks for all your replies guyz....I am still working out on this issue,.....the idea of moving physically the location of the BES server is the easiest way out but transporting the server will be another issue....Firstly, I feel it will be good idea to move local MSDE databases to a central SQL database..but again a question arises..whether it is possible to centralize the Blackberry configuration databases of 4 BES servers at one remote sql location....if yes, then how will one BES recognize it users when connected simultaneously...What complication will arise in this scenario...advise needed guyz....