• george sibbald (5/5/2009)


    In DR scenario my AD administrators will update the DNS entry to point to the DR IP instead of the primary server IP. So in effect, I am renaming the hostname/DNS name. As long as all the connection strings use the DNS name all applications will continue to connect without needing to change connection strings.

    Are you runnng SQL 2000 or 2005? I would have expected issues with msdb in 2005 in particular, as its maintenance plans would point back to the primary server and SSIS packages could potentially have incorrect connections.

    Yes, I'm booting from SAN and although I no longer replicate the SQL Server boot partitions I continue to do so for web and app servers. Keep in mind if you replicate the boot partition the DR server must be dark and you must bring the primary server down or isolate the DR network to avoid duplicates server names as the DR server will come onliine with the same name. If I were not using clustering I would replicate the boot partitions. Also if you're an HP shop you can use RILOE to power on servers remotely.

    So both primary and DR\QA boot from SAN but their boot partitions are independant? Any problems with boot from SAN? Interesting that you say you would go back to replicating the boot partition, would this not lose you your QA environment and the ability to patch the DR server without affecting the primary and SRDF, which sounds to me a good ability to have.

    regards

    george

    That's correct all servers boot from SAN and the QA and DR boot partitions are independent. Been using boot from SAN for 5 years and no issues. Since the QA partition is independent you would not loose the QA environment. If you're replicating the primary boot partition then there isn't separate patching process for the DR server. Patching the primary server patches the DR server. What I miss about replicating boot partition is in few cases DBAs did not setup the DR server with the same path and port numbers as the primary which then caused problems. when replicating the boot partition this type of thing doesn't happen because there isn't a separate installation to maintain.