Setting up BES Hosting Services
 

I work for an ISP/Corporate consulting firm and we are wanting to implement some sort of BES hosting for some of our smaller clients. They are in the position as to only have 1-2 blackberry's, and really don't want to purchase BES to run on their server due to the price/overhead involved with it. They would much rather me host it for them. My clients run the gammut of Exchange, Domino, and sendmail for email servers.

My question is this: How does one go about setting up BES hosting for a large number of clients on the same server? I understand the limitation of Exchange/Domino and can understand needing to seperates BES servers to do that, but let's use Exchange as an example. If I have 5 different clients, all running Exchange, and each client has 1 blackberry they want to use, can I tie them in to MY BES server so they do not have to purchase their own license?

Also, does anyone have any insight on how the current BES/MDS hosting providers are running things? Do they just require the user to use their Exchange/Domino server instead of their current email provider and just do alot of forwarding?

Thanks in advance for any information anyone has for me!

I'm not positive on this, but I think you would need a different BES server for each exchange server you are connecting too. At least with installing groupwise, we can't specify more than one groupwise post office that BES will connect to.

correct. not to mention that the BES servers would have to live in the same network as the email solutions. i'd suggest them running Desktop Redirector.

the other BES providers are Exchange-based (most cases) and the users have an Exchange mailbox with the BES provider.

Yep multiple exchange can of course be done, but they must all be part of the same domain/active directory.

I have 1 BES in an AD that contains 5 Exchange servers with 4 different internet domain names over east coast and west coast and it works like a charm. However, the BES and the Exchange servers still need to be in the same AD.

Thx, that's what I figured but good to know. Can you run more than 1 BES server on a server? Or is it strictly limited 1-1?

Running more than one BES on an Exchange Server
 

I believe it is technically possible, but from what I have been told by my RIM rep, they usually frown upon that if you have less than 200 users.
Take that information for what it is worth.

considering that running a BES on 4.0 (or hell, 3.6) requires somewhere in the range of 2GB of RAM to run comfortablely with all services, i'd not suggest running more than one instance.

actually, i'm not even sure that its possible to run more than one instance on one server.

what you are wanting to do would likely end up costing you and/or the companies a bit more money than you want to spend.

Given the number of BlackBerrys a single BES will handle, I am not sure why you look to run 2 instances on a single server. I would not suggest that since it won't be supported by BlackBerry technical support.

I, however, am interested in trying to run BES and GoodLink on the same server.

Again, check out VMware. It allows you to run multiple virtual servers on 1 physical server. I have a test server at work I'm playing with and have successfully setup win98 wkstn, win2k advanced server, suse linux and intel solaris running on the same machine. The OS doesn't even know it's a virtual server. VMware has clients that run on each OS simply to make up for display qualities (similar to the problems you get running a different OS within an X server), and it has done very well. Not a huge amount of cpu or memory consumption either.

You can even setup VMWare with it's own DHCP or internal IP addy's and NAT them to the outside world, or place the virtual servers directly on your corporate network with their own IP's.

Thanks guys. My question was to try and figure out a solution to do offsite BES server hosting for a multitude of clients with their own existing email infrastructure. Sounds like it would be just as efficient (if not more so) to buy the client an additional cheap server for <$1000 with BES and host it onsite. Thanks alot for all the responses!

Don't forget that Windows 2003 std. server license you have to buy for the BES. That will set you back another $600+.

bfrye, issues with USB driver support may halt some people with vmware and BES (if you use the USB port for pre-configuring the handsets).

I have been reading this thread, and have a question. I own an ISP with lots of bandwidth and a spare dual XEON 2.8 server, 2GB, Windows Server 2003, (3)73GB Hard Drives in RAID-5, etc....

One of my partners and I had an idea to setup a BES with EXCHANGE using a generic email address... Then, when we want to get our "other" email accounts to the BES, we would forward them to this "generic" account. This is actually what I do now with the T-Mobile Web Client.

Would this work? Is there an eval version of BES 4.0 that we can try? Also, one more question, I have a 7290, would I have to upgrade to 4.0? And would all of my users have to be on 4.0 to use the BES server?

Any direction would be appreciated!!!

Thanks in advance!!

It will work, but only for email, and it won't synchronize back to your real exchange box. There is a trial availabel from RIM directly. Call their sales line and they will set you up.