SQL server redundancy without failovercluster

Question

I would like to know what the best way is failproof your SQL Server without using a failover cluster.

A failover cluster requires an enterprise server which is not an option

Which version of SQL Server? – Massimo Mar 13 '12 at 19:32 — Massimo, Mar 13 '12 at 19:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 13 '12 at 19:34

Yes, Windows Failover Clustering does require Windows Enterprise edition or higher, but for SQL Server you need only SQL Server Standard Edition or higher. High availability (HA) solutions do have costs - and clustering needs shared storage - so my question is: perhaps the cost of being down is less than the cost of implementing and maintaining a HA solution? If so, that's absolutely fine.

Have you thought about log shipping? It's a more affordable solution but obviously is manual to invoke, and takes longer to come back up. Or database mirroring (marked for deprecation in a future version) offers HA and potentially DR too.

SQL Server 2012 also introduces a new HA solution, so you might want to have a look at that too.

thanks allot, i think database mirroring is a good option for me — Distracted, Mar 13 '12 at 19:53

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 13 '12 at 19:37

If failover clustering is not an option, then database mirroring is your next best bet:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189852.aspx

Depending on the client software used to connect to your database server, client sessions may be able to automatically failover between mirrored databases:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5h52hef8.aspx

SQL server redundancy without failovercluster

2 Answers2