migrating from BPS to BESX

[schierholzr]

I am a fairly inexperienced BB admin, but I like learning. Currently we have BPS on our Exchange 2003 server and about a dozen users. I was excited about BESX as a replacement/upgrade for BPS, but the direct upgrade is not possible. I have googled it and looked on bb website, but i think it's too early to get information.

Does anyone know a good process of switching/upgrading? Am i correct in assuming i have to uninstall BPS and install BESX; will i loose configuration/data? Is it worth it?

thanks for the help for a beginner.

[gadgetfreak2]

I am interested in doing this too. Still waiting for my 2nd e-mail from RIM with the download info. Also, will probably wait a little bit to see the best way to transition.

[jeremytn]

I did this last night. There is no upgrade. You have ti uninstall and install BESX. You will have to go in and delete the database in SQL.

I had to wipe my phones to get it to work.

Its a good upgrade. Well worth it.

[Minglewood]

We did this upgrade last night. Uninstall BPS and install BESX. I've read that a device wipe is recommended, but so far, we have not had to wipe phones. All is in sync. Maybe in a day or two something will tell us we need to wipe devices, but at the moment, it's all working (well).

[jlongjr27]

I have a migration question too. I am running BPS on a separate server using SQL server. I plan on installing BESX on the exchange server using the SQL server express.

My question is can I use the same besadmin account? Do I have to modify permissions or anything else? Should I simply be able to uninstall BPS and install BESX on the exchange box?

Also Minglewood, what exactly did you do after you got your BESX up and running?

Thanks!

[comptechltd]

jlongjr27,

I have the same questions as you. Can I keep the besadmin acct. and also which SQL databases should I delete?

Steve

[jlongjr27]

So I read through the admin guide for besx and basically setup the local permissions on the exchange server for the existing besadmin. Everything else was already setup.

I would assume if your installing on the same box with the same database server just uninstall bps and install besx under the besadmin account. Not sure what database to delete but it couldn't be hard to locate, it's probably named bb something or bps...

I am ready to install besx now and I think I will use sql server express. I'm just going to turn off/uninstall bps which is on a separate box now.

After reading a couple other posts I am going to try to add my phone to the besx server and see what happens with out wiping it. If I run into problems on the phone I will just wipe it, not a problem for me.

I'm still confused on the bis vs bes with my phone co. I currently have bes but don't want to loose the ability go do wireless activation if I downgrade our phones to bis. Maybe I'll have bes added if needed for a month and then downgrade to bis.

[jeremytn]

i used the same besadmin account.

[jlongjr27]

I installed the besx server to my exchange 2007 box last night. Went really smooth. Didn't have to wipe the devices. Just add the user to the besx server and it will automatically connect.

For S&G I did wipe my phone. It's a pain and kind of nice at the same time. Everything is reset to default and you get a fresh new os. But it does take a while to get all the settings back in place.

If your happy with the way your phone currently works with BPS just do the upgrade and don't wipe. You will start receiving email in HTML. Synchronization does start over so email previous to the upgrade won't delete from both places. Only new email once connected to the new server. I'm not sure of any other differences.

Now I am going to see what the difference between BIS and BES service plans are.

[croldan72]

For those that completed this upgrade, I have a couple of questions. We have an Exchange 2007 server with 4 GB of RAM, only 50 users, running W2k8 x64. We have BPS running on a virtual WinXP machine on a different server that only has 500 MB of ram allocated to it. We only have 5 BB users at the moment.

I want to run BESX on our exchange server, but the specs for Exchange 2007 require 4 GB of Ram and the specs for BESX say 1.5 GB of Ram free.

Sounds like I need to add RAM, but has anyone else had to make hardware changes on their Exchange server to run BESX? Could I just run this on the virtual machine? I have no problem adding the RAM, but I really just want to test BESX out to see if I should replace BPS (Knowing we would benefit from HTML email and ongoing updates).

[jlongjr27]

Well if exch 07 requires 4gb of ram you already don't have enough ram, lol. What does win server recommend?

I am running exch 07 on s2k3 x64 with 8 gb ram. I also have 50 users and 5 bb's. I can look tomorrow and see how much ram the besx services are using.

I would say throw a couple more sticks of ram in your exch box and put besx on it. In all actuality you could probably get away with 4gb if all your server is doing is email and besx. Just keep an eye on free memory and the page file.

[jlongjr27]

The 18 services running as besadmin that I think are related to besx are using 872,916K memory and sqlserver.exe *32 is using 32,568K.

There are 2 BB services that use more than 100,000K memory. BAS-AS.exe @ 528,856K and bmds.exe @ 106,744K

For reference my store.exe service is using 3,207,748K memory and my PF is 7.27GB. I have 1,481,200K physical memory free. From what I hear exch 07 is a memory hog. It will use as much memory as it can and free unused memory when needed.

Hope this helps some with memory questions.

[croldan72]

Originally Posted by jlongjr27

The 18 services running as besadmin that I think are related to besx are using 872,916K memory and sqlserver.exe *32 is using 32,568K.

There are 2 BB services that use more than 100,000K memory. BAS-AS.exe @ 528,856K and bmds.exe @ 106,744K

For reference my store.exe service is using 3,207,748K memory and my PF is 7.27GB. I have 1,481,200K physical memory free. From what I hear exch 07 is a memory hog. It will use as much memory as it can and free unused memory when needed.

Hope this helps some with memory questions.

Great. Thanks for the info. Exchange 07 is a definitely a memory hog. I plan on getting some more RAM anyway, but maybe I'll install BESx just to test it out until the RAM comes in.