[bfrye]

Many of you have asked how to upgrade from MSDE to SQL, or migrate to new hardare, or other similar questions. Well I did just that last night so here's a runthrough of what it took.

Previously we were running on a dual P3 box. GroupWise BES 4.0 and MSDE on the same machine.

We were wanting to upgrade to (2) dual P4 Xeon boxes. One for SQL and one for BES. Plus full SQL Server migration as well.

for the purposes of this, we'll call the current combined server OLDBES. The new BES server will be NEWBES and the new SQL server will be NEWSQL

First...

Shut down services, including MSDE on OLDBES. You'll need to copy the database and log files from MSDE over to NEWSQL. Going with the stock filenames this will be BESMgmt.mdf and BESMgmt.ldf. When we created the databases on NEWSQL, we created the file and then copied the populated databases on top of them, duplicating the filenames. So it looked something like this:

copy BESMgmt.mdf BESMGMT_data.MDF
copy BESMgmt.ldf BESMGMT_logs.LDF

Now restart the SQL server on NEWBES. If you use your SQL enterprise manager to navigate down through the database, you should now notice it popuplated with BES tables and information.

Now there's 2 ways of doing the next step. First is to open a command prompt and follow these steps:

ServiceName and MachineName will most likely be the same. Here the values were previously listed as OLDBES and are getting changed to NEWBES (not NEWSQL!!!!)

C:\>  osql -E
1>  use BESMgmt
2>  update ServerConfig set ServiceName = <name_of_destination_server> where Id = 1
3>  go
1>  use BESMgmt
2>  update ServerConfig set MachineName = <name_of_destination_server> where Id = 1
3>  go
1> exit
C:\>

This returned some errors, something about 70000 and 70010. But the values took so we ignored the errors. The second way of doing it if it works for you is to open the SQL enterprise manager, open the BESMgmt database and look for the serverconfig table. Open it up and change the names for the related fields there.

Restart your SQL server for safe measures and it should be ready to go.

Now I'm not going to go over the installation procedure for NEWBES. If you aren't sure how to install BES for the first time, you shouldn't be attempting this procedure.

So NEWBES should be up and going (not services, but installed). Open up the configuration manager and one of the first steps will be to ask where the database is. Point it to NEWSQL, and select whatever kind of authentication you used.

Note: If you used windows domain authentication, you will need to run the BES services on NEWBES using an account that has domain privs on both boxes. Otherwise the dispatcher, policy and sync services will fail to start.

Enter in your SRP, license info and whatever groupwise/exchange/notes post office info needs done.

When it finishes it should ask you if you want to start services. Click yes and get it started. Make sure, before you do this, that OLDBES is shut down and services disabled. It will disable your SRP and a phone call to RIM tech support will be required to get it enabled again.

No re-cradling or re-activation is required so long as you keep the same SRP info on NEWBES as OLDBES. Ours took about an hour before it started pushing out mail to the last people on the list, and after that worked a hundred times more reliable than before on the consolidated server.

Good luck!!!

[dev]

That's excellent bfrye....good info!

[bfrye]

Wirelessly posted (0U812: BlackBerry7210/4.0.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1)

Oh and the total time it took for this, for our first time and not quite know the procedure was about 2hrs from shutting down OLDBES until the time the last user (me) started getting mail again on his device. Would I have to do this again I'm pretty sure I could have it done and transferring mail again in under an hour.

For those of you wondering about performance differences... Like night and day. Typcially, on MSDE we would see maybe a 30min or so lag time during the heaviest parts of the day, and about a 2hr turnaround on reboots before it would sync up again. Today we saw no lag, regardless of the time of day, and the one restart I had to do earlier took about 20 mins at most before the last user started syncing mail again.

Like I said, the difference is like night and day and really was a minimal amount of work considering the data we shifted around.

[jibi]

Just to add, if you do not have to migrate the BES server to new hardware as well (just SQL), here are two alternative methods (a bit longer but the same idea behind the top part of bfrye's instructions):

http://www.blackberryforums.com/showthread.php?t=10406

Ahh, the joy of taking 10 different roads for the same resolution... oh well, atleast no one can complain about not having choices when doing a migration.