One of my first jobs when I was hired as stand-in sysadmin was to get our BES Express installation up and running and activate the dozen or so Berries on the server. Did that no problem but at the time we didn’t have enough licenses available on our virtual host, so I ended up putting the server on a standalone tower. Now that we have a new virtual host and budgeted a CAL for our BES, I’d like to move it over. Our virtual host is Enterprise Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. I’m using Virtual Machine Manager to move everything over, and I figure there’s no harm in running it, since if things blow up I still have the physical box to go back to. Couple questions before I jump in:

1.) The database is local to that machine, so I think I need to do an offline migration, correct?
2.) While the BES is powered off and migrating, will email and web browsing be offline for all my users? I know phone calls are independent of the server so I’m not worried about that, and web browsing isn’t a big deal, but if email is down that’s going require some careful scheduling.
3.) If for some reason I have to go back to the physical after trying the virtual, am I going to run into problems with database information?

Thanks!

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