Looking for input from those that have deployed BES 5. I've run round and round with different ways and wanted to get some feedback from others.

Currently, I support two BES domains, but will focus on one since they're pretty much identical.

I have ~1000 users divided among two 4.1.6 BES with SQL 2005 running on a separate physical server. The two BES are running in VM. My organization will be adding SRM from VM later this year to facilitate COOP\DR funtionality. I'm running one BES 5 (VM) now in testing and using a VM SQL 2005 server for the BESMgmt DB.

Question is do I deploy 2 BES 5 servers and HA each one knowing I have VM handling physical server failure (8 node ESX cluster, plus the SRM to a COOP site), or is it better to deploy 1 BES 5 for email, 1 for Attachment service/MDS, and another for HA? I haven't planned on doing any SQL mirroring, since the SQL is running under VM from what I've heard SQL mirroring isn't that fun. My existing environment could run on 1 server, but I've spread it across two BES because it allowed me to move users between the two if there was a problem with one. I'm probably over thinking the design here, but I'm also trying not to deploy 6 servers for BES. I've considered running two BES for email/MDS and one for Attachment service (since it's the one that always has the vulnerabilities with the PDF distiller), and one for BAS and no HA.


Any thoughts?

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

I am running HA pairs on VMWare. Even though our VMWare setup gives hardware HA, the BES HA is nice because you can failover to your secondary server for patching, etc. That also addresses your reason for having 2 BES; you said you have 2 with users divided between the 2 to be able to move between them if one has a problem. With one HA pasir, you don't even have to move users if one has a problem--you just failover.
I didn't put Attachment on a separate server, but it is a good idea given all the vulnerabilities that seem to pop up. I may offload it sometime down the road.
As for BAS, it probably depends on how many people will be using it; we have a lot of jr admins, so I setup 2 BAS boxes with a hardware load balancer in front of them. If its just you or a few people using it, you could get away with one, and maybe install BAS on your BES servers too to use if the BAS box has problems.

Hope that helps.