Hi Everyone,

I've been poking around RIM's site and I'm not able to find much information regarding best practices for Geographically disperse BES deployments and managements.

In my envornment we have about 2K users spreadout across 5 datacentres each with their own BES and BES Domain. We're currenlty running 4.1.x and are looking to upgrade to 5 in the very near future.

Has anyone come across any guides/etc... what I'm trying to determine is if there is a way to implement a single, global BES Domain as this would really simplify our infrastructure, management, etc...

While I could migrate everyone to a single Database in one of our datacentres I'm worried that latencey issues might effect DB connectivity. Database replication would be nice but it does'nt seem like RIM has support for multi-master replication. Any thoughts? Ideas? Etc...

While I have everyone's attention one more questions. In BES 5.0 Can BES application/server pools be shared accross BES multiple BES domains? E.G. One BB Router pool for my 5 BES Domains?

I've not come across any guides to do this. The best would be what RIM has released on scalability / connectivity, but even still nothing specific for 5.0

You should worry about latency. I'm assuming you have mail servers local to each of the BES, so you're not really gaining any HA functionality with a single shared database as you'll have to move the users to another datacenter ... but you'd gain a single place to manage all the users / policy / applications / etc.

Unless you've got good enough connectivity between the datacenters I'd say you're out of luck ... no multi-master replication.

I can't say this confidently, but I'm going to say no ... given that when installing the router component with BES 5.0 it talks back to the database.

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Whew... so its not just me ... I was worried for a while there that my search-FU was not strong enough

The distributed components are only capable of managing and integrating with a single domain. The BlackBerry Router is tied to that BlackBerry domain. The BlackBerry Administration Service can only manage a single domain. Etcetera etcetera.

Do keep in mind that management will be slightly easier with BES 5.0. BlackBerry Transporter makes it very easy to move users from one domain to another. Granted, you have to keep up with five different databases with five different configuration sets and five different BAS front-ends, but there are some smart things you can do, such as implementing a similar common DNS alias to each of the BAS pools (for example, bbadm-us and bbadm-uk and bbadm-mx) to make the access a tad less complex (or even build a jump page for the various regions, which is what we're planning due to the rather lengthy, non-redirecting URL structure for both the Administration Console and Web Desktop Manager).

Also, rumor has it that cross-domain support will come eventually to BAS, so that may solve at least one issue. As for the Router, do you distribute this into a DMZ? If not, due to the low overhead involved with that service, is there a point in moving it off-server (unless you were just using it as an example)?

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BCSA (4.1, 5.0) | BCSD (4.1, 5.0)

The views expressed by me on Port3101.org are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

I know how you feel. We have 4 separate BES environments, 2 still v4.0 (upgrading soon) and 2 v4.1, with almost 9,000 users across them. We have some inhouse tools to make management easier, but of course with 4 different DBs when users change between divisions they have to wipe.

Haven't even had time to look at v5.0 at all yet.

I want to “cast a line” on this one. I have an Environment with Multiple Exchange Servers (7 sites) with 2 BES servers (5.0.2). Currently Both BES Servers are using a single AD account for Blackberry Administration, however Site 1’s Exchange server went down this weekend for maintenance; Site 1 is also where the BESAdmin mailbox account resides, this pretty much took down our whole Blackberry force for a couple of hours.

Would you recommend that I We use multiple BES Admin accounts on different mail servers to prevent this? BESAdmin and BESAdmin2?

CrackBerryGuy,

Having a BES service account per BB domain basis is a best practice. but you can have static messaging agents per exchange server basis.

Cheers!!!

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Cheers!!

Apparantly after this past weekends fiasco; I've come to understand that whichever Exchange server the BESAdmin's mailbox resides on MUST be up, or else the blackberrys (Firm wide) will stop working. His mailbox must be online to monitor all the mailboxes for Blackberry Users; and preform GAL lookups too..

Am I right on this theory?

The answer to your question of whether you can combine all servers into one BlackBerry domain will depend on the ping times. The ping times between the BES and mail servers and SQL server is very important. It's highly recommended that the ping between the BES and mail server is less than 30ms. Higher ping times will cause timeouts and in Exchange environments, cause a higher percentage of UDP packets to be lost (users will complain of getting messages in 15-30 minute intervals). With high latency, you also will see more hung threads on Messaging Agents. Ping between BES and SQL should be under 350ms. If SQL is installed on Windows Server 2003, you should install the database notification system (look in install guide for instructions).


The BESAdmin account must be online and unlocked in order for the BES to access users' mailboxes in Exchange environments. Depending on who you talk to at RIM, they may recommend that you use different BESAdmin accounts for each BES or HA pair (primary/standby) in Exchange environments whether they're in the same BlackBerry domain or not. The real purpose for this is because of connection limits with Windows 2008 server based Active Directory. For myself, I just use the same BESAdmin account...it's just easier. Just keep in mind that the BESAdmin account has access to all users' mailboxes (assuming permissions are set on all Exchange servers). The more BESAdmin accounts you have, the more accounts that have access to all mailboxes.


For the Administrator with 4 BES servers and 9000 users...you're a brave man. RIM doesn't recommend more than 2000 users per server but I personally only go up to 1200 users per server. I just see too many problems going above that number. Use the BlackBerry Enterprise Transporter in the 5.0.x resource kit to move users between BlackBerry domains. With 4.1.x as the destination, you may run into the User ID issue though.

BES 5.0.2 has a cross domain web interface search that will automatically log you into the specific BAS the user is on (assuming SSO is turned on).