[dmarcantonio]

My company is currently in the midst of growing and we are looking to upgrade or compliment our current server as we're teetering around 200 BES users. It seems our activations are taking a little longer and reconciliations are a pain. Our current server is quad Xeon, 2003 AS, 4GB RAM, and plenty of HD space.

My question is, what would be optimal for a 500 user BB company in terms of BES?

Is it also possible to have multiple servers do load balancing, or would it be better to add 200 on each server, and add servers as we grow?

What are the options? Please don't blast me with answers saying do your research. I just signed up for this forum and figure I'd ask people with real world experience in these things.

Thanks!

[juwaack68]

Moving to BES Admin forum - you'll likely get more/better answers from here.

Welcome to the forums!

[x14]

First what platform are we talking about; Exchange, Domino, Groupwise.

Second, I think you have some config issue. I have 800 users on 1 server (smaller than yours). The server is also do replication with anohter server for failover. No problem with EA or reconciliation.

[dmarcantonio]

Exchange. I figured out why the server was a little slow. Anything I should keep in mind when optimizing on Exchange?

[hdawg]

Originally Posted by dmarcantonio

Exchange. I figured out why the server was a little slow. Anything I should keep in mind when optimizing on Exchange?

Yeah lots of things ...

Are your Exchange Servers and SQL servers on the same LAN as the BES?
How many Exchange Servers do you have with BES Users?
How large are your BES users mailboxes?
Do you have any 3rd party products integrated with Exchange? (A/V, Spam Filtering, Archival, Message Stubbing ...)

Run an ExBPA and see if anything comes up ...
Do a performance baseline if you can too
Can you fire up performance counters on your Exchange Servers?

What symptoms / problems are you seeing?

As far as adding more servers and doing load-balancing it all depends on your RPO / RTO / DR plans. Is BES a "Level 1" service that has to be up immediately? Can you stand a 2 hr outage? 4hr? 15 min? 5 min?

Without 3rd party software you can effectively do 10-15 minute recovery if you create scripts and have excellent monitoring. With it you'll be able to do ~5 mins.

If you've got 500 users and you're climbing with plans to hit 800 - 1000 ... its really time to look for a 2nd BES, if you're staying around the number you're currently at you can certainly get by with a single BES, but if you want higher availability ... get a 2nd BES.

What are your needs / requirements? ... lots of questions.