[bday]

Title should say 4.1.4.

My apologies in advance for what may be a repetative/newb question.

From searching the threads it appears BES is not cluster aware. Is this still the case with 4.1.4, and if so has anyone heard anything from from RIM about when it may be supported?

With have about 1,050 BES users right now and are growing rapidly. I'm looking to get off of the pokey 1 server we're running right now. Besides splitting the userload in half and bringing a 2nd BES server online, what are the available DR/HA options? We were hoping for the most automated method possible, but apparently that may not be the case.

I was hoping to setup 2 MSCS clusters (on top of the already existing one for SQL 2005) and replicate the SAN storage used by the standalone BES servers to the secondary datacenter.

Very straightforward stuff we are all probably used to doing.

What I wanted;

Site 1:
BES_Server_1_NodeA, attaches to SQL_DB_1
BES_Server_2_NodeA, attaches to SQL_DB_2
SQL_Server_NodeA, hosts SQL_DB_1/2

Site 2:
BES_Server_1_NodeB, attaches to SQL_DB_1
BES_Server_2_NodeB, attaches to SQL_DB_2
SQL_Server_NodeB, hosts SQL_DB_1/2


With the current state of things, am I forced to have 2 standby servers sitting at my second site, then if the primary site dies I manually start up their services attaching them to the already existing SQL databases?

Do the standby servers have to have the same hostname as the primarie servers or does pointing them to the appropriate SQL DBs and using the same BES Service Account perform all the magic we need and suck in the configuration?

Thank you all!

[hdawg]

Still not cluster aware.

You really don't want to use MSCS; honestly for application HA / DR you're better off using something like Neverfail.

Hostnames with BES don't matter, but the BES Server Name (which is set during installation), along with SRP information is what needs to stay the same for your DR scenario to work.

If you're serious about a scenario like the above one I would really consider a HA 3rd party product / vendor

[bday]

Originally Posted by hdawg

Still not cluster aware.

You really don't want to use MSCS; honestly for application HA / DR you're better off using something like Neverfail.

Hostnames with BES don't matter, but the BES Server Name (which is set during installation), along with SRP information is what needs to stay the same for your DR scenario to work.

If you're serious about a scenario like the above one I would really consider a HA 3rd party product / vendor

Thank you for the lightning quick response.

Why do you suggest Neverfail in this particular scenario? We use MSCS for numerous things here (Exchange, Symantec Enterprise Vault, SQL 2000/2005) and it serves us perfectly so far (knock on wood many times over!).

In the past I've shied away from products like DoubleTake and XOSoft (esp. now that CA bought them, they tend to ruin everything) to reduce the # of support contacts needed during a failure situation and/or I didn't feel like they were up to par. Neverfail is a new name to me, I don't mind checking it out.

*edit*

Ah, I see they have a BES specific solution, that is probably why you did. Going to check it out more now...

Neverfail - Blackberry High Availability & Disaster Recovery

[hdawg]

I tend to shy away from MSCS as it requires a lot of overhead (with regards to knowledge) of the product and often times when the sh** hits the fan recovery is not nearly as easy as any testing scenario ... plus MSCS isn't BES aware; Neverfail and other products like from MessageOne have BES aware components.

I can certainly understand wanting to shy away from contracts, but in the event of a disaster I would think you'd want to focus on primary core infrastructure and have your applications up in minutes which these apps all do.

[hdawg]

As follow-up, I'm not saying that MSCS is bad at all. It has its places and where it belongs it works great ... I used to be of the mentality to stick with all native stuff where possible and avoid 3rd party solutions, but I've seen some great success with the 3rd party apps where MSCS just couldn't do it right.

[bday]

Originally Posted by hdawg

I tend to shy away from MSCS as it requires a lot of overhead (with regards to knowledge) of the product and often times when the sh** hits the fan recovery is not nearly as easy as any testing scenario ... plus MSCS isn't BES aware; Neverfail and other products like from MessageOne have BES aware components.

I can certainly understand wanting to shy away from contracts, but in the event of a disaster I would think you'd want to focus on primary core infrastructure and have your applications up in minutes which these apps all do.

I appreciate the BES aware components, thats good. IMHO it should be "BES is not MCSE aware". ;) I'm all for whatever product does the best job so if something like this can do it then I'll put my support behind it. We've found in the past that when the proverbial **** hits the fan, streamlining the # of people you have to call makes for a quicker resolution. This is one of the reasons we stick with native tools when possible.

p.s.

This is for the Commonwealth of MA, so anything to help the BES system become more DR/HA capable will help you in the end as a resident.

[hdawg]

Outsource the BES management to the place I work for; come on we're in Waltham!

[Frank Castle]

Springfield MA here .. Clustering is due next year with BES 5.0, no ETA.

[hdawg]

@ jletendre

While I'm in Waltham I'm west of 128 so I'm not really "Boston" please don't hate on me. My wife is from Hardwick (Gilbertville actually), so I'm well accustomed to the "love" of Boston.

That said, I'm banking on 1H 2008.

[Frank Castle]

Considering we're still waiting for the free Monitoring tool as well the Web Desktop Manager ... your likely right.

People in Boston seem to think the state ends at Worchester.

[bday]

Originally Posted by jletendre

People in Boston seem to think the state ends at Worchester.

Ummmm....

[hdawg]

I didn't think people in Boston even knew about woosta.

<sigh>