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case studies High Availability with BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10.1 by Kevin Sparenberg of DLA Piper LLP (US) During the week of the 2013 BlackBerry Live Conference, BlackBerry officially released the 10.1 version of their flagship BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). I've been working with the new version since that time to engineer a new high availability (HA) BlackBerry 10.1 infrastructure for my firm and have become familiar with the many enhancements made with this release. High Availability First and foremost, BES 10.1 adds the HA that was lacking in the original 10.0 release. There are four main features to the high availability model in BES 10.1. The server infrastructure can now support database mirroring (as in 5.x), BlackBerry Administration Service via DNS round robin (as in 5.x), BlackBerry Device Service HA via node pairs in an instance (as in 5.x) and Universal Device Service high availability via failover instances. • Database Mirroring: The first three HA models are wellknown to those who have already architected high availability solutions for BES 5.x. Of these models, database mirroring has been removed from the installer, but can be enabled by following the instructions outlined in BlackBerry Knowledge Base article KB34373. The functionality of this feature does not change, even if the native mirroring has been removed from the installation process. • BlackBerry Administration Service: Installing the BlackBerry Administration Service (BAS) on an alternate computer was recommended for large deployments in 5.x, and that does not change in the 10.1 release. In fact, I would highly recommend this in any virtualized environment. The BAS on 5.x used to consume approximately 1 GB of memory. That has increased to over 2 GB in the 10.1 release. To take advantage of the HA functionality of the BlackBerry Administration Services, 28 Peer to Peer install at least two nodes with only the BAS (include the Web Desktop if you so desire) connected to each BlackBerry Configuration Database. • BlackBerry Instance Node Pairs: Like the BES 5.x server, you can run the 10.1 server using highly available pairs of nodes as a single instance. Think of an "instance" as a single connection to the BlackBerry Network Operations Center. Each instance requires a different Server Routing Protocol (SRP) number from BlackBerry. If you are retiring legacy BlackBerry servers, SRPs can be repurposed for your new infrastructure. • Universal Device Service Switchover: The one complete departure from the BES 5.x infrastructure in BES 10.1 is the automatic inclusion of the Universal Device Service (UDS) during the installation. In the current revision, UDS cannot run in a truly high availability mode. Instead, the service behaves as a manual switchover. Each BES 10.1 server installed has the UDS on it, but only one server can be online at a time. The UDS core services are linked to a specific BlackBerry instance (either a standalone server or node pair). If configured on a node pair, the UDS core services honor the active/standby status and will follow the active node. However, if the UDS core needs to move from one BlackBerry instance to another, manual intervention is required from the BlackBerry Administration Service. Finally, the UDS Administration Service should be running on only one administration server. If you are using DNS roundrobin for BAS and the "primary" server fails, you must enable and start the UDS Administration Service on the active BAS. Installer The installer process has changed slightly from that in previous versions. In many ways, the software has gotten significantly more