BES Express Redundancy / High Availability

[mvietori]

I understand that BES Express doesn't come with redundancy / high availability options; however, I've been tasked with trying to figure out a way to do this in our environment (currently, 200+ users on BES Express 5).

Our current BES Express is on a VM with a local SQL Express database. What are our options for getting some kind of DR plan in place? I assume I would need to transfer the database to a dedicated SQL box. Could I then just fire up a second BES Express VM and point it to the SQL db? Obviously I would leave the services on the second box off until I needed to failover. What would be the steps to do this, and has anyone setup a similar solution?

If the above solution is in place, and if the first BESEx fails, would all I need to do is turn on the services of the second BES?

Thanks!

[deebo550]

I have a similar setup. BESx in vmware and no DR / HA solution yet but in my research I found a program called appassure which you install an agent on the VM and you can create a hot spare every x amount of hours and if the main vm gets corrupted you can stand up the spare vm in its place. Its probably the route im going.