I was asked to step through the process I took to install Maintenance Release 1 for BES 5 last night. It was pretty basic but I made some pretty pictures I’ll post below. The process is mostly the same as in BES 4 but with the added benifit of being able to use failover servers.
Our environment has multiple primary servers as well as standby failover servers in a second datacenter. This allows us to keep functioning if one datacenter were to become unavailable. That also means I can update the BES without and loss in connectivity for clients.
I started by updating the failover servers. If I wanted to, I could have updated one failover server, made it the primary and check connectivity. If all went well, I could fail back and update the other servers. This might be overkill but it could also save me in the future. It is something I’ll consider next time.
Once I have the Maintenance Release on all the servers, I stop all of the BlackBerry services that are running. There are a bunch of them so I’ll probably write up a script to do it faster next time. Start the upgrade:
Enter your BESAdmin account and Password:
And now you wait:
Once you are done with the install, you need to restart the services. I prefer to restart the machine to make sure everything comes up cleanly but it isn’t necessary.
Now that the failovers are updated, you need to actually failover to them in order to patch the primary servers. This is accomplished in the BAS (BlackBerry Administration Service). Under Servers and components, expand High Availability, expand Highly available BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, and select the instance you want to update. Now you simply click Change primary instance to standby instance and confirm:
Update these servers like I wrote above and once you are done, make them the primary again. That’s all there is to it.