At my company we recently migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. One of the major steps in the process was migrating from Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.2 to Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5.0.3 so we could support our 50 Blackberry users. RIM provides a great step by step install which can be accessed here.
One of the steps is to create a throttling policy for the user account Assigned to the BESX installation. By default Exchange 2010 throttles access to all the various components of Exchange in order to avoid any one user (or users) from taxing Exchange. The account assigned to BESX handles all the email forwarding for every Blackberry activated on your BESX server. In order to avoid it from being throttled by Exchange 2010, and thus not able to forward emails to your activated BB’s, a throttling policy should be created for this user. While the how-to video RIM provides is nice, it hasn’t been updated for Exchange 2010 SP1. RIM instead provides a technical document with the updated info
One thing it doesn’t mention, and wasn’t obvious to me at the time, was that a throttling policy doesn’t take effect until the following services have been restarted:
- Exchange Throttling Service
- Exchange RPC Client
Having just put our Exchange 2010 server into production and with mailbox migrations scheduled we didn’t hadn’t restarted our Exchange server since creating and assigning the BESX throttling policy.
So as migrated users to Exchange 2010 and reactivated Blackberries on the new BESX server we started to notice that it was taking longer and longer for each successive Blackbery activate. Around the 10 user mark it started taking us more than a few hours to activate so we halted all migrations to Exchange 2010 to figure out what the issue was.
At first we checked our SPAM filters to see if the activation emails were getting caught, through there were a good deal of them caught whitelisting the emails didn’t fix the problem. Form there we checked the event log of the BESX server and saw a bunch of errors relating to failed activations, but nothing we could use to figure out what the problem was. So we checked the Exchange 2010 server and found our problem, the account to assigned to BESX was getting throttled. At first this didn’t make any sense since we knew the policy was created and applied as far as we could tell. So we ran the following PowerShell command to see verify the policy we created for the BESX account was applied:
Get-Mailbox besxadmin | fl Name,ThrottlingPolicy
The result was that the default policy was still applied; perplexed we reassigned the throttling policy:
set-Mailbox besxadmin -ThrottlingPolicy BESXPolicy
But the result was the same. A quick Bing/Google search revealed the problem (Thanks to Chad McGreanor’s Post). After restarting both the Exchange Throttling and Exchange RPC Client service (in addition to restarting the BESX server) the activation delays were finally fixed.
