Hello all. I am new to the forum and new to the BES administration game. There are a few questions that I haven't been able to find an answer to, and I was hoping that you guys could help. Here goes...
I read that RIM says 500 users per server is the recommended limit, but is there a hard ceiling which cannot be breached? We are planning on having 1500 to 2000 BlackBerry users, so we need to know how much hardware we need to buy.
Is BES a bandwidth hog? If the current project is given the go-ahead by upper management we could have 2000 or more users.
Disaster Recovery. What do you guys suggest?
Please let me know if you need any more information to help me out with these questions.
I think with decent hardware 2 servers should be sufficent in production and one hot spare. Its a process extensive environment, dual processor will be nice. It transmits data in small packets, but of course there is consistant polling. With 2000 users we have not seen a drastic impact on bandwidth.
I would say 3 servers assuming they are solid servers and a hot spare. Like the others have said there is a lot of communications from the BES to Exchange/Domino so that is something to take into consideration. But the inbound/outbound is minimal. Keep in mind a decent amount of RAM and maybe dual processors is would be worth the extra money. Good luck getting your environment up and running with that many users all at once!!! Hope you spead it out a bit.
You will share the SQL database, and have X BES front ends (I mentioned 5 for redundancy and scalability as well.)
While all users will share the same database, the BES servers will take the job of the individual checking. But you can drag&drop the users from one server to another. Which makes it very easy to bring up the hot spare.
The testing that was done to arrive at those numbers, upper limit of 2000 users for the BES server, is based on the MSDE database. It has being determined that approx 100MB is used for the new schema and approx 1MB/user is needed. However, for devices that are greater than 16MB, expect the MB/user value to increase up to 1.5-2.0MB. The size limit on the MSDE database is 2GB. So, at 100MB + 1900MB....you could squeeze out approx 2000 users.
At this level, however, RIM recommends that SQL2000 be used for the config database.
As far as the amt of users are concerned.....BES4.0 has replaced instances (only used in v3.6) with messaging agents. The BES server has only 5 messaging agents. Each agent handles a maximum 500 users. This equates to approx 2500 users. However, hardware specs, #of users, #of Exchange servers...etc determines what the final #'s would be. These agents automatically distribute the users to balance the load.
As for bandwidth...if there are users with large mailboxes, expect performance issues. Large mailboxes take longer to scan (especially when a user is reloaded). The ScanGAL service does the rescanning of mailboxes. This is further complicated if the Exchange servers are not located on the same LAN, or in close proximity to the BES server. MAPI is quite chatty, and is not well suited for WAN connectivity. Given the fact that the minimum latency allowed is <35ms for BES-to-Exchange communications.
As far as DR is concerned, there are a couple of options:
1. SQL clustering - this provides High Availability
2. A couple hot spares for the BES servers - physical hardware or VMWare with serveral BES instances running with services disabled.
However, RIM will not publicly support VMWare in this instance.
If your budget permits, it's better to scale up if there's consistent growth potential in the numbers of users. Scaling out increases the administrative and support costs and the footprint required.
We will be using SQL 2000 Enterprise Edition. However, I have been informed that we are going to put the new BES system on some older hardware. Probably Dual P3's or something. However we will have access to quite a bit of these servers. I number that I had in my head was 3 SQL servers and 5 front end servers.
The most activity goes on database. So as long as the db is on cluster and decent hardware, I belive you should be ok. Dual p3 for BES is quite fine. The only concern is if for any troubleshooting you enable all the logging then it demands lot of space as well resources
New to BES and I have a few questions.
![Radiomatic Flo-One Beta Radio-Chromatography Detector A-500 Model A525 [E2FL] picture](/parts/img/g/IjcAAOSwd1hfMYum/s-l225/Radiomatic-Flo-One-Beta-Radio-Chromatography-Detec.jpg)