Hi All, We are about to install BES in one of our sites. BES version 4.1.7 (company standard) and Exchange 2003 (company standard). We already run BES in our HQ without any issue, however I just wanted to check a few things - There is a great article here on the affect of BES on Exchange 2003: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/admin/deliverables/3532/Performance_Benchmarking_Guide.pdf I've also read various articles on the internet and had some questions based on these: 1. MAPI calls on Exchange: Will a MAPI (or RPC call) happen only when BES performs the 15 minute rescan, or will it happen whenever BES wants to "pull" an email from Exchange? 2. Does the BES Service account take any resources on the various mailbox servers, or is it the BES users' mailboxes that do (or both)? 3. There is much talk about BES and Exchange and IOPS. Let's say one Exchange (non-BES) user causes x amount of IOPS. Is this measureable? And does BES-enabling them cause that x value to increase? Or is the BES Service account that causes the increase in IOPS? 4. Why does BES 'supposedly' take so much resources from Exchange whereas ActiveSync doesn't? What is the difference in architecture here? 5. Going back to the measurement of RPC Calls on Exchange. If there was an RPC call from BES and an RPC call from Outlook, would they both have the same effect on Exchange, or can one RPC call (e.g. BES) actually take more resources in any way? Surely no since they are just MAPI connections? 6. When installing BES against Exchange 2003, what resource (disk, memory, CPU etc) have people seen the greatest effect on? 7. Does BES affect the RPC Latency at all on Exchange? Any help appreciated!

1. BES beats the ____ out of the Exchange server. Consider that one Exchange 2003 user with BES counts the same resource-wise (except the size of the mailbox) as 4.5 to 5.5 non-BES users. 2. I don't think it's significant compared to the user mailboxes. 3. The IOPS numbers aren't readily separable with normal performance tools. BES and others have done more sophisticated testing, and the numbers I gave you in question 1 are pretty well accepted by the Exchange community for Exchange 2003. The multiple goes down significantly in Exchange 2007. 4. BES keeps polling the mailboxes via MAPI looking for changes. ActiveSync is kind of push driven (some would say it's technically not, but for the purposes of this discussion it is), in that there isn't any traffic until a change is registered in the mailbox. 5. There are different RPC calls for different things, but I don't care to write a treatise on that, even if I were qualified to do so. 6. Disk. With Exchange it's almost always disk unless you host a lot of users on a server, at which time memory can be impacted. 7. Sure it can. Pretty much any server performance degradation manifests itself in RPC latency. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Yoshi66" wrote in message news:f894aad8-77d2-475b-a91d-28e82126687a... Hi All, We are about to install BES in one of our sites. BES version 4.1.7 (company standard) and Exchange 2003 (company standard). We already run BES in our HQ without any issue, however I just wanted to check a few things - There is a great article here on the affect of BES on Exchange 2003: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/admin/deliverables/3532/Performance_Benchmarking_Guide.pdf I've also read various articles on the internet and had some questions based on these: 1. MAPI calls on Exchange: Will a MAPI (or RPC call) happen only when BES performs the 15 minute rescan, or will it happen whenever BES wants to "pull" an email from Exchange? 2. Does the BES Service account take any resources on the various mailbox servers, or is it the BES users' mailboxes that do (or both)? 3. There is much talk about BES and Exchange and IOPS. Let's say one Exchange (non-BES) user causes x amount of IOPS. Is this measureable? And does BES-enabling them cause that x value to increase? Or is the BES Service account that causes the increase in IOPS? 4. Why does BES 'supposedly' take so much resources from Exchange whereas ActiveSync doesn't? What is the difference in architecture here? 5. Going back to the measurement of RPC Calls on Exchange. If there was an RPC call from BES and an RPC call from Outlook, would they both have the same effect on Exchange, or can one RPC call (e.g. BES) actually take more resources in any way? Surely no since they are just MAPI connections? 6. When installing BES against Exchange 2003, what resource (disk, memory, CPU etc) have people seen the greatest effect on? 7. Does BES affect the RPC Latency at all on Exchange? Any help appreciated! Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Great, thanks. Just one last question....I understand that Exchange (2003 at least) allows a maximum of 32 simultaneous MAPI connections for a particular mailbox. So, in a large BES environment (say 1000 BES accounts) where all the BES servers use one shared Service account, how can this work? Surely the BES service account will exceed 32 MAPI connections at some point?

I've never heard of such a issue but I can't tell you that it's not a problem. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Yoshi66" wrote in message news:b6663092-33c1-44d9-900f-c2e4d8ba9beb... Great, thanks. Just one last question....I understand that Exchange (2003 at least) allows a maximum of 32 simultaneous MAPI connections for a particular mailbox. So, in a large BES environment (say 1000 BES accounts) where all the BES servers use one shared Service account, how can this work? Surely the BES service account will exceed 32 MAPI connections at some point? Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

But I am correct, aren't I - there is a limit of 32 simultaneous MAPI connections per account?

I don't know. You're welcome to research that. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Yoshi66" wrote in message news:cf4988d5-4bf5-42ef-bec3-e12205d1b57d... But I am correct, aren't I - there is a limit of 32 simultaneous MAPI connections per account?Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."