[Joshm74]

Hi all,

We are currently running BES 4.0 Lite (or is it called SBE?) and wexxx8217;d like to upgrade to BES 4.1.6. However RIM have informed us that BES 4.0 Lite is discontinued and that they no longer offer the one-time upgrades to BES 4.1.6. The options they have given us therefore are as follows:

1. Upgrade to BPS 4.1 (which I understand is a cut down version of BES and has stripped out functionality such as support for HTML emails etc)

2. Upgrade to BES 5.0 (which we are not keen on just yet due to the number of issues Ixxx8217;ve read about it)

I then spoke to our carrier who stated that they can sell us the full BES 4.1.2 Enterprise software at a discounted price, which we can use to in-place upgrade our existing BES Lite, whilst retaining our existing CALs and SRP. We can then service pack upto 4.1.6 free of charge. This sounds like a better solution as we get to retain the full Bes functionality (rather than moving to a cut-down BPS) and its much cheaper than going to BES 5.0. However I just wanted to get confirmation that this would actually work?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[hdawg]

Yeah; that'll work.

[Joshm74]

Thanks hdawg. Just as a follow-up question - our existing BES 4.0 Lite is running on very old hardware (PIII 900Mhz, 768Mb RAM...dont laugh!) so would that be too slow to handle 4.1.2 if we do an in-place upgrade? (We only have 12 Blackberries ;))

We do have a newer server (Xeon CPU, 2Gb RAM) that we are planning to knife-edge cutover to shortly after the in-place upgrade is done on the existing box. However I'm now thinking whether it would be better to knife-edge cutover to the new server first (i.e simply move the BES 4.0 installation over) and then do the in-place upgrade to 4.1.2 on the new server.

Do you think that would be better?

[besadmin23]

I'd say it probably won't make that big of a diff. I think I would do it on the old and then cutover. With that few users, it's not like the machine is stressed. Where is your DB? On the old machine?? Are you planning on moving it to the new?

Or is it remote in which case it doesn't matter.

[hdawg]

Personally I'd knife-edge before upgrading ...

First thing is move the database (unless as besadmin23 says it is already remote), then do the knife edge.

[Joshm74]

Thanks for the advice guys and apologies for my late response. Our DB is sitting on the same box as the BES (we are using MSDE2000). The machine does periodically throw up virtual memory warnings so we end up having to reboot once a month, so I think I feel safer doing the knife-edge first then the upgrade.

I plan to use the RIM KB10278 as a guide (cant post the link due to low post-count).

However it says in the guide to backup and restore the MSDE DB using the 'osql' commands, whereas with BES 4.0 I always backup/restore the DB using the 'BlackberryDBBackup.exe' tool. Does it make any difference which tool I use or should I stick to the documentation?

Thanks again for your help.

[nobody7290]

If the current BES servers job is Blackberry and maybe filesharing,
Cant you put some additional RAM in the Xeon ?
Then, clone the current BES to a virtual machine on the Xeon
move sharepoints to somewhere else,
make the in-place upgrade to the Enterprise Version + upgrades to 4.1.6