Hey there fellow admins-

I am designing my new BES 5.0 environment, and I wanted to see if anyone had any opinions on design for High Availability. I've heard that RIM's internal IT group utilized VMWare vMotion to achieve High Availability, rather than utilizing the new HA features of BES 5.0. What are you all useing? Have you had any successes, or failures?

I have a test environment going well, a few problems with certificates and our F5 HLB, but overall going well.

If I utilize BES HA, I would have 4 BES servers, 2 SQL servers, 2 BAS servers.

If I utilize VMotion, I would have 2 BES servers, 2 SQL servers, 1 BAS server.

I'm looking at possibly using a combination of both. We've moved our SQL 2005 to VM and have moved away from MS clustering. Our BES servers are on VM now, but moving forward to BES 5 I may utilize BES 5 HA to provide HA on the BES services. VMWare (with the addition of Site Recovery Manager, for us), I believe is quite capable of providing a robust and high available BES/SQL environment.

__________________
AUTIGER92
Exchange\Blackberry Admin
4 - BES Servers (4.1.6), 3 Exchange Organizations,
~1800 BB Users, and a headache.
War Eagle!!

What are you trying to achieve?

What is your pain point for downtime.

VMotion is not a HA solution. It lets you migrate VMs between hosts while they are running.

VMWare has 3 HA solutions.

1) HA. Where 2 or more hosts share a SAN unit. If a host goes physically down, the VMs running on it crash, and they are automatically assigned to a new host and powered up. Cheap, efficient if you can afford the downtime.

2) FT. Somewhat similar to MS clustering services. Tere ae some pretty brutal limitations on the make up of the VMs to qualify for FT. But no downtime.

Both of those are geared towards the failure of equipment within a physical location.

3) SRM. Needs replication capable SANS, Fast connection between remote sites and $$$$. It will automate recovery in the event of a site being destroyed.