Migrations... oh, my

Making changes to a working system are usually a source of nail-biting for me -- Domino upgrades excluded. They rarely take half my lunch break and much more rarely have any significant hiccups. I have had three significant projects pending since late 2008 which were postponed due to health problems in the family.

The first was the addition of a Sametime IM gateway to our messaging environment. With the help of Lotus911 and specifically Chris Whisonant, we got that one knocked out in early January. That project was an addition to our production systems, rather than a change. The following two projects involved migrating existing systems. A couple of weeks back, my very patient managers were prodding me to move ahead.

The next project was migrating our Citrix datastore and licensing server to new hardware, and particularly to SQL2005. The move to SQL went fairly smoothly, though it took longer to repoint the 18 Citrix servers to the new SQL datastore than I had planned. I was able to move the licensing the following day with users logged on and no one was the wiser.

The next, and most "dangerous" -- in my mind -- project was to modify our Blackberry environment. This meant standing up a new Windows 2003R2 64 bit server with SQL2005, then migrating the BESMgmt data from MSDE on our lone, corporate BES to the SQL2005 server, followed by installing BES 4.1.6 on that new server and connecting to the SQL database so that both servers share the same BESMgmt data. Last, migrate 700+ users from the old BES to the new and decommission the old one.

Anytime we talk about changes to our Blackberry environment, we shudder, but RIM has gotten better over the years, in terms of product stability, documentation and tech support. We decided to do this transition in steps. First, migrate the managment database and hold. Then install the new BES software and hold. Finally migrate users.

I did a lot of research online at BlackberryForums and RIM and felt faily comfy with the db migration. However, after preparing the SQL database, backing up the BESMgmt db and importing it into the SQL Server, the Domino server kept showing an error authenticating to the new database every time the BES tried to startup. The admin account on the BES had proper rights to the SQL data so I couldn't figure out why authentication was failing. I quickly had RIM on a webex/phone conference and after some poking around, determined that the BES host server(name) needed to have a proper authentication to the SQL server as well. After fixing that, all was well for that phase of the migration, we let it hum for the weekend.

Next... the BES install.