I’m currently sitting at the airport waiting on my flight home from a conference.  I still have quite awhile so I figured I would post something quick about BES on virtual hardware. 

It is fully supported on VMWare 3.5+ and mostly supported on VMWare 4.  In our environment, we have 2 primary BES servers with 2 failover at a regional datacenter.  SQL is also separate with a failover.  There is a new initiative to virtualize everything and my team decided that BES would make a good candidate.  For the most part, the hardware requirements for 1200 users was minimal.  When we did the BES 5 migration we decided to move off the physical hardware and go completely virtual. 

This hasn’t turned out well for us so far.  Even though we have a pretty massive VM environment, we are still having troubles.  It isn’t due to the most common problems you see.  We aren’t disk I/O bound.  We have plenty of memory and processing power.  Our problem is because of the network.  The BES servers need a pristine connection to your mail servers.  Normally they do but occasionally they hit some bottlenecks.  The BES servers can handle a few of these but if it is an outage lasting a few minutes or several shorter ones, it can cause the agents to hit the max 10 restarts per 24 hours.  When that happens, you have no choice but to restart.  This has happened to us more times than I can count.  Part of the reason is we have been running the hosts at their max.  That is something you should be able to do with VMWare but if it spikes, it can cause latency and kill the agents.  Another thing that has happened is our DR snapshotting software has issues.  It queries for changes every hour and if you have a lot of hosts, it can cause brief locks.  Even though it is only for a few seconds, it can still cause agent restarts.

Now I’m not saying don’t virtualize.  I’m not saying our problem is related to BES or even VMWare.  It is due to how we have VMWare implemented.  If you are running your hosts at their max, you might want to rethink virtualizing BES.  I would also recommend installing some networking monitoring software on hardware separate from the virtual hosts and see if you have any drop offs.  We experience the drop offs on other non BES services but it only affects the BES.

Virtualizing BES can save a lot of money but make sure you truly have that pristine connection.  Without it, you will have a lot of headaches.