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Recommendation for Memory Allocation - Log Shipping

  • August 20, 2015 at 1:19 am

    #311000

    I'm log shipping to AWS. Currently, we are shipping from a server with 64 GB RAM to one at AWS with 30. It's not a massive server but does have periods of high usage when certain jobs/tasks run. It's been running fine for a year but the server size is large and is barely used. My understanding is that for simply log shipping, we don't need a lot of memory and I was hoping to drop the instance size down and use an instance with 16 GB Ram instead. It would save thousands per year.

  • August 20, 2015 at 2:44 am

    #1821288

    It's not log shipping you need the memory for, it's when your primary fails and you have to switch over to the secondary to keep the app running. The question you need to ask (and ask the people paying for this) is if you do drop the memory on the secondary to 16GB, and the primary fails and you have to switch over, what will happen?

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

    We walk in the dark places no others will enter
    We stand on the bridge and no one may pass

  • August 20, 2015 at 9:23 am

    #1821444

    GilaMonster (8/20/2015)

    It's not log shipping you need the memory for, it's when your primary fails and you have to switch over to the secondary to keep the app running. The question you need to ask (and ask the people paying for this) is if you do drop the memory on the secondary to 16GB, and the primary fails and you have to switch over, what will happen?

    The nice thing about this is that it's for catastrophic failure and has an RTO of 24 hours. The purpose of doing a small instance for log shipping is strictly for cost. What would happen in a failure wouldn't be automatic, someone would have to manual hit a switch and bring that server and everything else online. So when something like this does occur, because it's easy at AWS to change instance types, the instance type would be bumped to a much larger on demand instance while a disaster has occurred and then the server would be brought online.

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