Quote:
Originally Posted by ldub
Is there a recommended number of users to stay under when running on VMs or is it purely dependent on the H/W?
Currently we're running about 1300-1500 per physical server and load is pretty minimal.
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Recommended capacity depends on the number of messaging servers you have. In the Exchange world of MAPI, the server performance starts to exponentially degrade as you add users on different mailbox servers to it. RIM recommends optimal performance with a 1:1 ratio of BES to Exchange. In one region, we have more than 40 Exchange servers in our current mail infrastructure across 8 BES servers. Prior to my arrival is when they topped out at 500 users and then built a new BES and populated it and so on and so forth. When I started looking at this and redesigning our infrastructure for a 5:1 ratio (taking into account the default 5 mailbox agents from BES), we had just begun work on consolidating our Exchange environment with SAN storage. In a couple months, we'll be down to 6 Exchange servers, thus being able to reduce our BES environment by a couple servers and increasing the number of users that are managed by each one. Should be interesting.
Anyhow, users-per-server is not a great way of determining your BES limitations. It's based on system performance, messaging infrastructure, and finding a balance of BES-to-MSG ratio (if more than 1:1, that is). From there, it's just monitoring your system to see when/if you have a degrading of service for your users.
One more thing to remember is that following a reboot, service restart, etc., the time it takes to recover and be 100% functional (post-rescans) is directly dependent on the number of users you have on a server and the messaging infrastructure.