We are currently running the BES server using a SQL 2000 backend which is hosted on a seperate server. We also only allow BES console access through Terminal Services on this server. Lately we have found this to be bottlenecking at certain areas, so to aleviate the problem I had an idea to move the BES database onto SQL 2005 Express locally and upgrade the memory to 4Gb. Unfortunately, we are not able to buy another SQL licence at this time so SQL 2005 Express is the only option (apart from MSDE, which I know is supported, but the plan going forward would be much preferable for SQL 2005 Express)
My questions regarding this plan are:
Can you import an SQL 2000 db into SQL 2005 Express?
Is the BES server compatible with SQL 2005 Express?
Apart from the 4Gb Database limit, are there any other major restrictions? Note that only 4 console users are likely to be active at one time.
If someone could answer these questions, I would be most grateful.
I think it is unlikely that SQL 2005 Express will provide better performance for you. Even with only 4 console operators you are likely to hit a built in performance throttle in SQL due to the number of connections that will cause major performance issues for you. It isn’t appropriate to use MSDE or SQL 2005 Express beyond an evaluation phase of Bigfix, once you have more then one operator you’ll see performance drop very quickly.
If you could provide some more details about your bottleneck I might be able to suggest another temporary solution. You are correct that moving the sql database local to the BES Server is likely the best option but there may be other temporary solutions that could help.
So, is the bottle neck disk speed on the sql server? Is it sharing the server with other databases that causes the problem? Is it poor hardware on the sql server causing the issue like a lack of memory?
From what I can tell, the SQL server is becoming overutilised by other applications/databases which means the output to BES is a trickle rather than a stream. When more than one console user is on the server is when the slowdowns become more prominent.
Also, BES is connected to the SQL server over a GB switch.
The BES server only has 2Gb RAM at the moment, but this will be increased shortly to 4Gb. That wouldn’t fully sort out the slow data transfer from SQL.
Alright, it sounds like you are on the right track. There isn’t much we can do if the SQL server is shared with other apps and overutilized. Please let us know if you are able to move the sql instance locally and if that helps improve your performance.