MS SQL Server - Q: creating replication of the system

Author

Q: creating replication of the system

JIM.H.

2006-02-25, 9:27 am

Our APS.Net eCommerce application runs on a web server that reaches SQL
Server in our network. We are looking for options to have two different web
servers and Database servers so that if we have a problem in one web server
or a database server, the other will still continue to serve our clients.
Questions:
1. Is this the way everybody does to create backup for the system?
2. Does SQL Server support this, if yes, how?
3. Are we expecting change in web-based application for this?
Thanks for your help.

bluefish

2006-02-25, 9:28 am

Hi Jim,

1. Is this the way everybody does to create backup for the system?

Lot of companies have keep SQL server backups for emergency. Some keep back
ups in tape, and some have log shipping set up so if something goes down,
then you can restore the databases within hours. More critical business and
service will really on replication.

2. Does SQL Server support this, if yes, how?
Yes, set up replication in number of different ways. There is a very good
documentation on replication on knowledge base that I found couple of years
ago.
You can have failover clustering, in which case if one server failed, the
secodary will take over. On the back, we have done disk mirroring, so if set
of disk failed it can point to the next. In this case your application will
be independent from the everything. It was amazing that in testing, when we
stop one sever, there was a really small down time, ( 10 seconds) and back up
server picked up, and clients were completely unaware of the problem.

JIM.H.

2006-02-25, 9:28 am

Hi Bulefish,

Thanks for your rely. It seems failover is the one once one server fails the
other takes over. So only one server is active at a time. How does
application reach the active and standby server, do they have the same server
name?

How is multi-site working in SQL Server. We actually want to balance the
load too, so there will be more then one server active at a time and serving
the same web application, is this possible? We are wondering is we have more
than one server, will we need modification in the web application.

"bluefish" wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> 1. Is this the way everybody does to create backup for the system?
>
> Lot of companies have keep SQL server backups for emergency. Some keep back
> ups in tape, and some have log shipping set up so if something goes down,
> then you can restore the databases within hours. More critical business and
> service will really on replication.
>
> 2. Does SQL Server support this, if yes, how?
> Yes, set up replication in number of different ways. There is a very good
> documentation on replication on knowledge base that I found couple of years
> ago.
> You can have failover clustering, in which case if one server failed, the
> secodary will take over. On the back, we have done disk mirroring, so if set
> of disk failed it can point to the next. In this case your application will
> be independent from the everything. It was amazing that in testing, when we
> stop one sever, there was a really small down time, ( 10 seconds) and back up
> server picked up, and clients were completely unaware of the problem.
>

bluefish

2006-02-28, 8:23 pm

In the specific scenario I explained, one server is active, and the other is
passive. In this case there is a virtual server (with virtual IP), which is
pointed to primary server, and in failover it will point to secondary. The
application will access the virtual server, and therefore, for the
applications point of view two servers are the same.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...n/failclus.mspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189910.aspx

As far as I know failover clustering does not provide load-balancing option.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260758/en-us

Perhaps you can look into a disk configuration option such as RAID5, which
would reduce the disk I/O overhead, and increase the fault tolerance, along
with disk mirroring. You can also look into replication option for load
balancing.

"JIM.H." wrote:
[color=darkred]
>
> Hi Bulefish,
>
> Thanks for your rely. It seems failover is the one once one server fails the
> other takes over. So only one server is active at a time. How does
> application reach the active and standby server, do they have the same server
> name?
>
> How is multi-site working in SQL Server. We actually want to balance the
> load too, so there will be more then one server active at a time and serving
> the same web application, is this possible? We are wondering is we have more
> than one server, will we need modification in the web application.
>
>
> "bluefish" wrote:
>

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