Good morning all. I was curious to see what your DR testing setups are. I ask because we have been testing our Exchange DR in conjunction with our BES (4.1.6).

Our email is outsourced in that they manage all of the servers, but we maintain the "application" side of our messaging infrastructure. I apologize for any holes in my post, as I just was just asked my opinion today and I don't know everything "they" are doing.

My understanding is that they have been bringing up a 20 user test BES, moving accounts to it, then moving maiboxes to the DR Exchange box. I assume the test BES is in the same domain, but nobody can answer. The issues we had with a smaller test a few weeks ago was that a majority of people ended up with multiple Address Books and Calendars and thus, duplicates.

Only one example that I have looked at actually had to service books remaining from the test BES. That was easy to clear up. All others have had Two Desktop Address Books, one with one synchronizing and one not. Same with the Calendar.

It was easy to fix the duplicates, as RSET cleared both and only the wireless synchronizing address book re-populated, but the other Desktop Address Book and Calendar remained, though empty.

So my question is this. Is the fact that they are bringing up a secondary BES with a different SRP and moving users to that before moving the Exchange mailboxes causing this issue?

Under those circumstances, they would need to perform a wipe on the device to avoid the issues. We have our configuration currently setup with a standby partner on a VM ESX environment that's off-site. This is configured in a knife-edge state with a manual failover mechanism in place (batch files). SQL 2005 mirroring is configured for the database server to an off-site DR SQL server. Obviously with this configuration, we're going to implement RIM's HA implementation as we're already 95% there with the database mirroring and standby BES servers.

Assuming you want all services with no user interaction, I would recommend you do something similar with your current DR configuration (same SRP, same BES name, database mirroring and/or backup/restore jobs that are fairly accurate, etc). If email is the only important thing, then a lot of this may not be needed. However, given your concern over the duplicate PIM services, I would imagine that email is not the only important item.

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