[BBSS]

I know that RIM says BES can support approx 1,000-2,000 users on one BES...but does anyone actually have this many users on one BES?

The most users I have heard of on one BES is a few hundred. Everyone I hear adds on additional BES's per a few hundred users because when you get to 500+ there are software bugs with BES. Not stable.

Is this the case?

[illy]

my data:

Number of Users: 800
Messages Forwarded: 4142003
Messages Sent: 157797
BES Version: 4.0.3.3

NOT true...

[d_fisher]

We got about 880 users on our first server before it would not take anymore. It seems pretty stable to me, but that may be due to maintence performed by the server team. I think they reboot the server once a week, but not 100% sure on that.

Doug

[BBSS]

our BES has been crashing with about 350 users. We also have a few other BESs with 50 or so users each and they crash from time to time too.

[mahoward]

We have 2.2 SP6 for Domino supporting 1200 users. It crashed regularly until I upgraded the memory from 2GB to 4GB. 2 crashes in 5 months since.

[BBSS]

thanks for the info mahoward. I am checking the memory situation right now.

[BlackBerryLinks]

With many users on a BES for Exchange you get a slow down because of the MAPI protocol connections.
Also a BES with a MSDE database support up to around 500 users, what RIM advice.

Regards,
Bob

[BBSS]

we are on a domino email environment with MSSQL

lots of crashing problems. looking to add on over 1,000 BBs but need to figure out the crashing issue first. RIM TSupport is no help.

[morrison23]

For what it's worth we've got two BES 4.x servers with almost 2,000 users apiece and, while they seem to function OK when it comes to mail forwarding, they consistently have issues with enterprise activations.

Additionally, BES Management utility can take up to 15 minutes to load.

[BBSS]

morrison23 - what service pack on BES are you using on your two BES servers and what email environment are you?

[morrison23]

We're on Exchange -- I looked all over the BES servers and I can't figure out where to determine the service pack level... If you can tell me where to look I'll let you know what SP it's running.

[jibi]

I'd have to say that they have a good method of doing QA regression testing for numbers - otherwise, they wouldn't be here today. They have likely put more than 2,000 users into a stable environment, so I'd say that the number they give is more of a low-ball approach (although high enough to be marketable, as well).

I think a major issue you will see with the increasing number of users (even I notice this with simply 80 users on a BES) is the time it takes to load all of the users after a reboot or something similar. With 10 or so users, rebooting the server during the middle of the day will go unnoticeable; however, with a few hundred users, I would imagine that there's a few minutes worth of a delay on message delivery during that time.

[Baldric]

As a starting point check your hardware:

You need a P4 with 60Gb HDD & 1.5Gb RAM for < 500 users; 2Gb for 500-1000 users; 4Gb for 1000-2000 users.
PLUS the attachment service needs 1Gb & the MDS 256Mb RAM.
If you have more than 200 users then you should be using SQL & not MSDE.