[Rich Y]

hello all and happy holidays,

I have a BES for exchange system set up in full DR mode:

2 * BES 4.0.6
Intel Xeon 3.6Ghz
3Gb RAM
2 * Remote SQL database
2 * Remote attachment service
2 * Remote router

spread over 2 data centres.

We have 1200 live users.

I know that for each BES can have 4 messaging agents, each messaging agent has a maximum of 500 users giving you a maximum of 2000 per BES.



What is anyones thoughts on an ideal MAX number per BES.

What sort of peformance issues has anyone seen on similar hardware?

cheers,

[ashworth]

We like to keep ours around 1000 users per bes. I feel that is a good number.. we will start looking at adding another BES when one of them get over 1300...

[Bikejunkie]

Ashworth, how much memory and speed of your processor do you run for each BES? I run in VMware right now and have about 550-600 users per BES, but try to watch closely to see when I need to add an additional BES. We are running BES 4.1.6 MR1 w/ Exchange 2007 SP1.

[ashworth]

Hey BikeJunkie,

I have 4 gigs in each of my servers, and Dual 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4.

I'm also running 4.1.6 with Exchange 2003 sp2/2007sp1

[scorpius]

The theoretical maximum amount is 2000. I am supporting several BES Servers for different customers and most I have seen get performance issues around 1000 users. The real maximum I have seen was around 1300. Best to not let it get above 1000 users per BES server.

[CarterTan]

The theoretical maximum amount is 2000 users for a BES server.
1 BES running on full SQL can have up to 5 Agents
1 Agent can theoretically support up to 400 users
1 MAPI thread can support up to 4users and there for 1 Agent can have up to 100 threads

These are all the theoretical explanations but there are cases where there are 200 users in each Agent and users are experiencing performance issues.

The best thing to check is in your BlackBerry Agent Logs to check how much percentage of memory is being used by the BES so that you will know how the BES is performing.