george sibbald (3/25/2009)
thanks for replying guys!Mr(?) Noob, your way certainly gets round the upgrade problem.
Trouble is I am greedy and was really hoping to leverage SRDF to keep the failover in synch for me by replicating system databases as well. Because there are not just logins, but DTS\SSIS, agent jobs, linked servers as well. If they could just be kept in synch and just be there when we failover that would be so good and justify SRDF as more than a faster way to failover and back. Quite keen that the failover server ends up with the same name as the primary as well.
Michael, I like the boot from SAN idea, do you do that?. Our intel guys don't seem keen, saying there are performance problems. Seems to me it would give the slickest failover though.
I will be setting up a proof of concept and try all options I can think of, see how they compare.
Other option appears to be replicate system databases but not C, and split the disks being replicated when we do upgrades then re-establish SRDF.
you can do it. somewhere in BOL i think there are instructions to move system databases to another drive. for the domain name the failover server is different unless you drop the old one and rename the DR server.
if you can wait 6-12 months Intel is about to ship it's new CPU's in a week or so and the hardware will be so powerful you can run SQL in VMWare and just ship the virtual machine file to your DR site.
next week Intel releases their new Nehalem CPU's that Apple and Cisco already announced a few weeks ago. this one is a dead end since they skipping this current generation and will release a new generation in less than 12 months unlike 2-3 year time as before. I think next week's release is 45nm and they are going to 32nm later this year. from what i read a 2U server with this CPU should support up to 192GB of RAM. and these machines will come with PCI Express v2 which is twice as fast as the current I/O system
we used to run log shipping here years ago before srdf and before i became a dba. from what i heard there were always problems and they had to always reinitialize it with a new full backup/restore. mirroring is almost the same thing and subject to the same problems