Yes, you may have issues. RIM strongly recommends that the BES and Exchange servers be located as physically close to each other as possible. Somewhere (I can't locate it) there is a specific latency that RIM suggests you adhere to - I thought it was < 35ms, but it could be higher than that.
It is totally based on WAN latency; high WAN latency and the BES gets bogged down and starts locking worker threads. It can get messy.
Thanks guys. We have a very fat pipe. But you are right in bringing up the issue with user load. We already experienced hung mapi threads and that is with the BES local. Not pretty. We have about 2500 users.
how do you connect your offices? T1? DS3? ATM? We are having bandwidth issues and are not sure if it's because of the bandwidth or the way we set up our network. We are running windows 2003 server with the domain controller in Oakland. Our Exchange server and BES are in the same office in LA. We have 2 T1s bonded together from Oakland to LA. After typing this out I realize most likey it's caused because we are running our voice, data and video conf on those two T1s. We are moving offices in October and it wont be a problem there but we need to resolve the issue now. Add another T1 line?
For North America, I'm running a 4.1.3 BES in the same data center as the mail server.
But I have a single BES 2.2 for Domino that hits remote mail servers on every continent on the planet. Network is mix of MPLS and frame. Works pretty well for the 200 users. Considering some countries have one or two BlackBerry users...we can't justify a BES for each site.
BES 4.0+ with the "extended load on the network" as RIM calls it, with the read/unread marks and other OTA features did NOT work in this arrangment. It put too much traffic on the network and we had to go back to the trusty 2.2 BES.
BES Over WAN
Yup
