A Mixed Bag Of BES 5.0 - Lessons From An Install

Gabriella Davis  June 18 2009 05:52:33 PM

So i'm late to the party on BES 5.0 but I'm afraid I have a rule to not install anything until I've read the documentation.  In the case of BES 5.0 that was 12 - count them - separate multi hundred page PDFs.  Eventually they wore me down and I felt that I had 'enough' of a handle on BES to go ahead and upgrade our small test server which only has 7 users on it.   Today I upgraded that install with 2 security patches (7th April and the replacement from 20th April) and the MR1 fixpack.

So far a lot of not good and not a lot of good.  Firstly the hardware requirement for BES 5.0 is probably above what many companies are running their existing servers on.  The install alone requires 2.5GB of free space and the requirements for the servers are obviously heavier than for Domino standalone (although credit to RIM it's nice they have documented the hardware specs for different kinds of load in their admin guide).

BlackBerry Enterprise Server that supports up to 200 users • Two processors, 2.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® • 3 GB of memory • 2 drives, RAID 1

BlackBerry Enterprise Server that supports up to 500 users • Two processors, 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon • 3 GB of memory • 2 drives, RAID 1 or 4 drives, RAID 1+0

BlackBerry Enterprise Server that supports up to 1000 users • One processors, 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series (Dual Core) or two processors, 1.6 GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series (Dual Core) • 4 GB of memory • 4 drives, RAID 1+0

BlackBerry Enterprise Server that supports up to 2000 users • 64-bit operating system recommended • Single processor, 2.83 GHz Intel Xeon 5400 Series (Quad Core) or two processors, 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series (Dual Core) • 4 GB of memory • 6 or 8 drives, RAID 1+0

Now let's look at a few things that AREN'T supported

DMZ The BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server components, with the exception of the BlackBerry Router, do not support installation in a DMZ.
This was always true for Exchange due to the port mappings required but now it's documented as unsupported for Domino explicitly

Email application The BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server components do not support the installation of email applications on the same computer.  
So for all those SMBs who were using their Domino server for both mail and BES, you're out of luck.

IBM® DB2® UDB The BlackBerry Enterprise Server version 5.0 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server components do not support IBM DB2 UDB. Support for IBM DB2 UDB is planned for a future release.

BlackBerry database notification system The BlackBerry database notification system does not support installation on a computer that runs Windows Server® 2008.
Since you can now install each of the Blackberry server components on different boxes you can install the majority of the Blackberry services on Windows 2008, just not the notification system.

Onto the install which was reasonably painless however once installed you'll find there is longer a Blackberry Manager tool instead they have replaced it with a particularly ugly and clunky browser tool. No I misspeak.  They have replaced it with 4 ugly and clunky browser tools (see screenshot below)

 

Now I understand wanting to move to a browser management interface, easier to use from more client platforms in theory.  Sadly this one is only supported by IE6 with Javascript enabled.  Fantastic for those of us on a Mac. I can only hope they are going to extend the supported browser clients to Firefox at least in the near future.   So I upgrade to BES 5.0 and all looks fine.  No errors.  All services started.  I can login via my IE6 web browser through my Windows VM (I'm going to keep finding that annoying) - but no mail.  I can see the mail attempting to route but it doesn't send to RIM.  Usually that's the fault of the Blackberry Dispatcher service not running but that looks fine.  So I check the connectivity to RIM although nothing has changed on the server since 4.1.6 and sure enough bbsrptest to both srp.eu.blackberry.net and srp.uk.blackberry.net work fine.  

Now I'm stuck

So I start looking around at the event log and in the Admin client.  In the event log I can see failures from the dispatcher saying "cannot connect to localhost on 127.0.0.1".  Weird.  So I start looking for anywhere that references localhost because in my installs I never use that as a setting anywhere.  Eventually I find this buried menu item (clear as a bell)



and under that a page that said "localhost" under srp address. Where it got that from I have no idea and why it decided to use that as a srp address I can't imagine but I corrected it as shown below and the Dispatcher was happy again.  Mail was now flowing and I could breathe once more.



So I now had a BES server upgraded to 5.0 that appeared to work.  Onto the clients!

Client Desktop Manager
RIM have replaced the Desktop Manager install with a new - you guessed it - web based desktop manager.  Now I quite like this as installing DM on client machines is a pain.  The new client interface allows the admin to let the user do their own backups, set their own activation passwords and even resend themselves service books as well as control their filters, multiple address books for syncing and email redirection settings.  It's a very nice interface to be honest, my only issue is that to login to it you have 3 options

1. Create each user a BB account (name and login) in the BES Admin interface under their name
2. Use LDAP to authenticate against Active Directory although this seems more appropriate for an Exchange environment since in most Domino environments the name mapping from AD to Domino name doesn't exist
3. Turn on DIIOP on the BES or another Domino server and use that to authenticate each user into their BB account using their Domino name and HTTP password

For some reason on 2 of the accounts which worked beautifully on the same server for pure Domino login, the DIIOP login refused to work and I had to create Blackberry login accounts in the web administration client for each of them.  That needs some testing.

So it's a start.  I"m not impressed with the admin interface or the fact that it's IE6 only.  I'm concerned on the reliability of DIIOP for the logins and I'd like the AD option to not even be there in a Domino environment so user's aren't 'tempted to click it.  BUT I'm very excited by the screenshot below which brings us DR on the Blackberry for the first time.  More reading and experimentation to come but I"m keeping customers well away for the time being.

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